Superb ToneMatrix light sythesizer from aM laboratory.

Can you guess the names of the 50 films to be found in the Empire Cryptic Canvas?

A new way of finding the odd tune or other file on the internet, FilesTube.com.

Dub Disco Deli pt.5 - More Deep Disco from Leftside Wobble. Quality tracks as per usual.

After a few years of use and then quite a few years in the back of the cupboard it’s time to finally sell my Roland MC-303. My reasons for selling this are to free up some room (really need to declutter) and to allow someone else to make use of the instrument.

When I opened it for the following photos I managed to crank one more tune out of it before I packed it away for the last time. It took me just under an hour. Have a listen (download mp3).

It’ll be on eBay this week!

Here’s some things I’ve been looking at over the past month:

The Eyeballing Game - I managed to sneak under 4.0. How good is your coordination?

Best of Bootie 2008 CD - is now out (free download). Featuring the best mash-up mixes of the last year. Quality stuff as per.

LIFE Magazine Photo Archive. Huge resource of images.

The 50 most Strangest Buildings in the World. It’s a funny old world.

2nd in my series of eclectic compilations with an electronic twist. Included in these tracks are funky harp playing, strange 80’s sounds, cartoon soundtrack remixes and some great edits of some old classic tracks.

Feel free to download this here - eclectronica02.mp3 - or use the music player below.

Tracklisting:
01 - Rosko - Peacemaker
02 - Owusu & Hannibal - Delirium (Morgan Geist Tongues Remix)
03 - The Art of Noise - Robinson Crusoe
04 - Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
05 - Reel People - The Journey
06 - Bob James - Nautilus
07 - Parallax - L’attaque des Tridents
08 - Dorothy Ashby - Truth Spoken Here
09 - Ralph Myerz & The Jack Herren Band - A Special Morning
10 - Morgan Geist - Lullaby
11 - Château Flight - 1973 (Future Beat Alliance Remix)
12 - Linda Jane Bull - Wake Up And Make Love To Me (Courtesy of Sounds of our Youth Records)
13 - B-52’s - Mesopotamia
14 - The The - Giant (Pilooksi edit)

Well it seems that as the world leaders meet at the G20 summit this week, (it’s called a “summit” as they always have summit’ to talk about), the main thing they’re deciding on is the best way to fix the economy in a unified fashion. Having Brazil do this and Canada do that just isn’t working, so it seems, so all the leaders along with their treasury brain-boxes have got together to thrash out a solution.

Gordon Brown himself is in a very peculiar position. Behind in the polls but constantly gaining against the Torries the worse his economy gets. What kind of incentive is that? If this keeps up he should just devalue the pound to it’s lowest level since 1946 and call a snap election in the same week, bingo!

No, what Mr Brown is going to do is to actually buck this trend. He wants the economy to do really well and hope that, by the time he calls the next election, we’ll all reward him for making us better off.

Before the current economic crisis the best way in recent times to make the economy better off was the simple idea of job creation. If the government creates a job not only does the employee not claim benefits but they actually start paying you tax - it’s like a ‘6-point game’ in football. Labour was good at this and they did create a huge number of jobs around Britain. I myself benefitted from the New Deal packages, which now seem so outlandish as they were created using money from a £5bn windfall tax on private companies. A windfall tax, surely not? Isn’t that a bit, you know, Marxist.

We can’t create jobs now though apparently as companies around Britain are shedding them due to some kind of recession. During a recession most of these companies still make huge profits but not enough to make the shareholders happy. That’s when we get the news that “BigCorp has made 5,000 employees redundant”, or that the “RBHBHS Bank has shed 25% of their workforce”. So nice to see that many of the workers at these companies are making the biggest sacrifice of all as they go out their way to increase shareholder value. Unfortunately they wont be having a quartly appraisal now in which to bring this up.

So Brown must go back to the drawing board and think again. And it seems that what he’s going to do is create what’s know as a ’stimulus package’. God, that sounds pretty macho, doesn’t it? I can see Brown putting on a Barry White LP while he tells us that he’s about to make us relax, put a smile on our faces and save the country’s economy with his huge stimulus package, “now lie back and think of England”.

But the truth is that this stimulus package aims at putting a whole bunch of money in our pockets in a multitude of various ways. This is meant to kick-start the economy; save jobs; solve the current retail crisis; reduce inflation; and make us happy Labour voters. The government doesn’t quite have this money so we’ll all have to pay it back in one form or another in higher taxes in the future. This mechanism is also known as ‘Tax and Spend’.

Now I get to the main point I wanted to address. Who is Brown going to give this money to? And how will he do it?

An obvious way would be a straight income tax cut. Brown has already done this, with mixed results (the 10p tax debacle), so he may leave well alone. Also it’s hardly going to send you rushing to the shops when you realise you’re getting, say, £10 extra in your pocket every month.

He could try George Bush’s method of giving around £400 of tax refunds to every tax paying American. This could work and it’s the one I’d benefit from most. It might just take a bit of time to work through though.

He could decide to give it to families earning under a certain amount by utilising the Family Tax Credit system. This also would take time to work and has the huge problem in not giving ME any money and alienating all those single people out there, many who are potential Labour voters.

One brave option would be to temporarily cut VAT from 17.5% to around 10%. It’s bold but consumers would feel the effects straight away. That is if the retailers actually reduce their prices by this amount instead of just pocketing the difference themselves.

No, I think he should give every man or woman over 16, in work or not, who earns less than £40,000 per year a nice cheque for £250. In time for Christmas. This would reach the recently unemployed too, unlike the tax rebate measures. After spending all our tax money bailing the banks out surely he could throw some our way. And we’d pump it straight back into the economy, not into offshore accounts.

Rough calculations show this as costing around £10 Billion - a snip. To pay for this we could just do another windfall tax on the utility and oil companies. They’ve put their utility prices up by so much in the last three years and have seen their own profits shoot up at the same time. The main UK energy providers made profits of over £3 billion currently, an increase of 538%, and the oil company Shell alone made nearly £8 billion in the first six months (read this Unite article about Energy company winners). I’d like to see people argue against that. Well, apart from oil men of course. I’m sure they’ve just been saving up for this eventuality anyway.

So there you go Mr Brown, my sticky plaster for the current recession. And just think, it’ll pay for nearly half of the HD TV I’ve been looking at buying for the last month. And as I stare at you in High Definition over the next year I’ll probably be thinking to myself, I might vote labour this year. Everyone’s a winner!

Here’s a few interesting things I’ve seen or heard on the net recently.

Want to edit your photographs but don’t have Photoshop? Then use the online image editor at Pixlr. It’s relatively simple to use.

Live camera from the LHC collider in France.

Games:

Coign Of Vantage. Rotate the screen using your mouse to find the hidden image.

Totem Destroyer. Perfect blend of skill and luck. I managed to do all 25!

Split Words. Match the correct parts of words together. This is much harder than it first seems.

Music:

The Re:Publikan Podcast. Download mixes by AtJazz, Mark Farina etc..

Dixon presents Inner City 2005 - 2008

Here’s a few things I’ve been looking at during our dreary summer.

20 Abandoned Cities and Towns at Web Urbanist.

Minimal Techno actually invented in late 60’s shock! Hear the lost tapes of Delia Derbyshire the BBC electric music pioneer.

The timeline of internet memes. From this chart I think I was first getting into the internet in 1998.

Superb interview podcast with Charles Webster. Some great songs there along with a discussion about his new compilation CD on NRK Records.

Well I picked up one of these last Saturday and I thought I’d share how I feel about the device.

Firstly, it looks amazing and is a perfect size, roughly 5 CD cases stuck together. And for £39.99 does the three things I need it to do; listen to radio; allows me to plug my mp3 player into it; and is a portable speaker with the addition of a battery. I’ve been looking for something that could do all this for a while at that price, but with no luck.

Plugging in my mp3 player the sound was amazing. It disables the volume control when you do this turning it into a simple monitor speaker. It’s very punchy for it’s size and was much louder than I thought it would be.

The radio auto-tuned in around 30 seconds and it found 20 stations to listen to. I was getting 3 out of 7 signal bars but this seemed enough for clear reception.

I often listen to the radio as I fall asleep and the Pure Mini’s low volume range was perfect. I had three volume settings that could all be used for getting off to sleep depending on the external noise.

But, it’s not all roses. I’m finding quite a few issues with the machine. Enough to think about taking it back and waiting another year for some one to create the simple radio I need.

Now, I’m not sure if it’s just this strange humidity we’re getting in the south of the UK this week but my DAB reception has been all over the place. It’s jumping from 1 to 4 bars (out of a max of 7) constantly which is leading to a lot of bubbling and cutting out. I don’t live remotely or in a valley and the Pure Bug Too I had for a month last year had amazing reception so I can only presume that the DAB tuner in the Mini has been scaled back. Then again, I also lose a Freeview Multiplex with this weather so maybe it is just atmospheric conditions. There’s no external aerial socket so you’re pretty much left with the 17 inch fully extended aerial to get a signal.

Selecting the station is also a bit more complicated than it needs to be. It needs three actions; pressing the stations button, turning the volume dial to the required station, then pressing this dial in to select it. An additional station dial would have been better, although I think the normal Pure One uses the same all-in-one functionality.

Finally there’s one issue which could well be a fault. When the radio is on standby, i.e. plugged in but in the off mode, and the mp3 player is plugged it occasionally makes some feedback noise, like a cough, as if it’s discharging some energy. It’s very annoying and loud enough to wake you up.

So, I’ll wait a week or two but if I’m still having issues I’ll have to take it back and maybe buy a more expensive, less portable radio. That’s unless somebody can suggest a solution to the reception issues. Can I crocodile-clip a better aerial to the top of the current one?

Welcome to a new series of music compilations heavily inspired by Charles Webster’s (miso records) radio shows for Ibiza Sonica. It’s a selection of lesser known tracks with a variety of styles, age and tempo, from Grace Jones to Aphex Twin. I hope you enjoy!

download -> eclectronica01.mp3

eclectronica 01 - compiled by John King

blaze - lovely ones
senor coconut - around the world
rae & christian - spellbound
atjazz - parralels
aphex twin - ptolemy
grace jones - i’ve seen that face before (libertango)
cpen - speedfreak
millie jackson - all the way lover
aqua bassino - espirito de amor
freaks - the rain (version 2)
chico mann - sound is everything
steve lawrence & eydie gorme - black hole sun
logan - flash (charles webster’s radio friendly vocal mix)
eurythmics - city never sleeps

Yes, another set of links I’m dumping here top clear up my browser’s bookmarks.

Film sequel quiz. Go on - you know they made one more.

Current status of HDTV in the UK.

Logic Puzzles. For when you want to waste an afternoon.

Sorry I Missed Your Party. If you can’t make it to a party youself take a look at these ones.

Whole Lotta Blog. Searches blogs for links to music files. Dodgy (in the crim way) but very good at finding obscure stuff without resorting to bit torrents.

German Bunker In My Garden. Guy tries to find a bunker in his garden. Start at the link and work your way up the archive.