It’s now been 2 years since we first rescued Yoshi Stack from his Peckham flat and to mark the occasion of his birthday, we unpacked and expanded sets of the collection onto empty desks in Toproom of Limehouse Town Hall for more public review and reflection.
Over three days we met with friends and delighted in the astonishment and enjoyment of those who visited to delve deeper and look further into Yoshi’s Stack of Cameras, Artworks, Journals and Photographs.
The process of exploration and rationalisation on such a collection is ongoing and the search for a suitable exhibition space is on. Please do get in contact and visit any at the weekly Wednesday sessions from noon. Toproom 5, Limehouse Town Hall 646 Commercial Road London E14 7HA. yoshi@spc.org or call James 07973318881
We just experienced the hottest day of the year at 34c which reduced activity not least as the shed became uninhabitable, a reminder of runnaway climate change devastating many places worldwide.
We jumped on the bike to have air flow and made it to Co-opepys where final stages of preparation are underway to set up Kali Hypothesis, a participatory detective story which explores our DNA relationship with virus disruption and behavior programming. We are excited and pleased that our resident artist David is showing this work for the first time, there in Pepys Estate.
Whilst the shed was over-heated switched attention to the wood store and the side of the end of terrace house. Always on the lookout for useful materials, had already collected most of what was needed. The timber shelter got rebuilt so it protects everything much better.
All the water from it’s new 7m polycarbonate roof is captured in a 200l water barrel for use in the front garden which is dry as a bone most of the year. Extra light reaches the ground since removal of the huge sycamore earlier this year, now we are looking for a climbing rose to bring some colour and a bit of extra pricklyiness to help protect the side access.
The Wealth of Negations log we helped rejuvinate in the spring has tracked news of international disasters, global temperatures and commented on the general mood as issues stack up. We are being ‘sheltered’ from the world climate and exploitation news, why is that?
Later today will attend a meeting at LimeHouse Town Hall to focus on a raft of building development and management initiatives. There will be a solar energy capture system for the roof once it gets further refurbishment and rationalisation of the internal wiring to accomodate these additional demands on its antiquated power infrastructure. It’s 20 years since formation of the Limehouse Trust a milestone that will be celebrated with a week of activity in second half of September 2024.
Upstairs in TopRoom the Yoshi stack has been sorted and documented though the process goes on to review the 50 years of photographs. Do come visit any Wednesday from noon or participate in daily workshops on 18th, 19th and 20th September from noon till teatime which forms a key part of our contribution toward these celebrations.
Yes, there are still a couple of desks for rent in Toproom
Boxing Club are offering desk access in the Toproom of Limehouse Town Hall. The building is collectively run for social good and community development, seeking more like-minded contributors. Three of five desks are currently available in this large light room overlooking St Annes church and It’s well suited to digital and handicrafts. Each also has shelf-storage, GB fibre broadband and other utilities all inclusive, £170 per month. Please email hello@bclub.org.uk, drop by to check it out yourself or call YT !
Nothing suits us better than a phase of reflection on action. So it is with YT after a very busy first half of 2024. Each step along the way has been stimulating and fruitful yet there is much to consider going forward, some of which we have yet resolve or respond to.
Fate of Britain seemed to lead the way early on in Manchester at Factory International with Jeremy Deller of Hard Arts taking on the difficult subjects of our time in the Work We Need to Do. Yet it’s not their voice we hear as July begins but the drone of political jerry mandering and reconfiguring for the next few years as we elect a next set of keepers for the UK in an overdue election after decades of corruption and ineptitude in government.
Here at home in UK it’s been testing enough but it’s the horror of war in Yeman, Ukraine and Gaza raging on, that will continue to call us out into the streets in support of all who face distress. Meanwhile work continues on social co-ordination and collaboration that brings people together to explore options and intervene on the rolling over of community hope, with positive engagement and cultural innovations.
Something has to give if the next decade is to be one we can hold to rather than hide from. We are all signed up to non violent action in the hope for reasonable change in our lives but as the light on recent realities fades red with distruction and dystopian reality, you may well wonder, what is it we can really do to shape decisions and effect cruicial transformations without more vigour in our reponses.
Pico Peers met in Berlin to review the state of change 20+ years since we drafted a Pico Peering agreement that was adopted by Community Wireless Network groups worldwide. Our hosts at C-Base and their regular patrons Freifunk made it possible for us to catch up, hear about new ideas and entertain friends on the roof in sunshine and showers with barbeque and beers.
We heard from Ramon Rocco of Guifi by remote link, a reminder that fragility and breakdown of belief was all too real. This was harshly highlighted as he described the cataclysmic community rip off that will bring their long standing successes across Catalan and Basque regions to a close fast. A huge portion of their valuable network infrastructure has been aggressively captured by commercial interests with little care for continuity or the wider disruption caused.
Citipunkt and Agit in Berlin both present community spaces in support of local struggles and social movements east and west of the city, with a combination of kitchen, meeting spaces and resource libraries. More public utility spaces are always welcome, with pressure on us all to navigate media and filter information in isolation, taking the time to meet and hear first hand from those who experience life differently or are in need of support is vital if we are to understand the changes needed.
Co-oPepys weekly artclub activities are not limited to crafting, though it’s the regular and long lasting persistance of community access to these spaces that is so treasured. Resident artists and Pepys Estate residents work together to host artclub activities and promote fresh interaction as well as review the legacy of many decades of open collaboration.
During a recent visit to Summerstown near Kings Cross we visited the Peoples Museum where the account of local action on depravation and mismanaged social resources is recorded.
Only last weekend, housing focussed community action groups met at preliminary session for Festival for Urban Liberation 2025 in the open at Aylesbury estate in Southwark where there was a very upbeat celebration of shared interests and commitment to reconvene in September for more detailed and inclusive interaction on London’s housing crisis.
The account of social struggles and urban exploitation has it’s pioneers. Mark Saunders has 40 years of independent TV and community video production experience which is archived at Spectacle’s studio in Lavender Hill. Get your legacy video tapes or film digitised, find out more about campaign histories or join a training course to get the most from that documentary film making idea.
“Why work?” is a critique that forges a perspective which cuts through the smoke screen of various specialist concerns around work. The role of work is re-examined to bring out the fundamental issues, often obscured and diffused by separated, isolated ideas of leisure, efficiency, careers, jobs creation, employment and unemployment. Work is a science, a religion, a culture and a way of life. As a society only five per cent of work is productive or socially useful. And with leisure being so important, why are we working harder than ever?
It’s the end of June already and there are consecutive days of sun and a feeling of summer has arrived at last. It’s been an extraordinary month and a whirl of emotions starting on 1st with a wake for mum. Anne Stevens died on 31st March after many troubled years in residential health care. Family and friends gathered in beautiful rural surroundings close to the family home for 50 years. She provided the support and encouragement for whatever we got up to, with good humor and a twinkle in her eye, always!
Sisters Vanessa and Emma did such a lovely job of setting up the barn so we could host everyone to share the celebration of a very full and loving life, much missed. Bill Drake accompanied our Ruby on flute and we heard tributes from family and friends before feasting together, listening to Melissa sing jazz ballads and catching up with each other. Love these notes from mum’s artist friend of many years, Annahita. The gallery of drawings and paintings were pinned up around us was up for grabs so everyone got a slice of the creative legacy cake!
In some contrast on 5th June Lisa Bennett and YT married after 33 1/3 years together. Our amazing daughters Laurel and Ruby were witness at the Lewisham registry office ceremony before friends and family first gathered at our home in Deptford, then joined a huge picnic in Greenwich Park Flower Garden till dusk. It was such great fun we should repeat each year!
It was Lisa’s 60th birthday the following day so we traveled out for the day to Broadstairs for Fish and Chips and Ice Cream in the sunshine (mostly).
Then on Sunday 11th June was Ashfest a day with our road closed for partying and street art activities all afternoon with fine food and refreshments, live music and jolly neighbours.
Spring arrived in fits and starts this year and now May is long gone! On Mayday we followed the Jack and Deptford Fowlers from the Dog and Bell into Greenwich along the Thames before pealing off to Limehouse Town Hall on the DLR to continue sorting the Yoshi stack.
SPC rents a Toproom desk at Limehouse Town Hall where work continues each week sorting the collection of cameras, sculptures and photographs. However we spent today resetting the whole room, all but Owens corner anyway! He runs the Wheelers bicycle maintenance group which regularly meet on Saturdays in the main hall for bycycle repairs and refurbishment.
There are currently 3 generous desk spaces available in the room each is just £170 per month all inclusive. One is by the door and the other two are next to each other between windows. Each has a large desk and good amount of shelving though no other storage. There is high speed wired and wireless FTTP broadband, a colour laser printer and A4 scanning equipment. We share a small kitchen with other Boxing club members in the building and events organisers in the hall are often around up here preparing catering and refreshments.
Limehouse Labs co-ordinate tech services at LTH including the Ubiquiti network hardware to distribute FTTP broadband access to the many resident groups and guests visiting the hall for community events and parties. Front of house security including door buzzer and VOIP calling will be added now they are back from EMF camp.
Since the start of the year SPC have been busy with refurbishment of network services at five of the [ SPACE ] studio buildings in Hackney, London that we have recently added back to our set, making a total of 13 we now support for artist broadband access.
Deborah House is not far from Hackney Central with 4 floors of artist studios. We installed 15 Ubiquiti UAP’s to replace legacy Ruckus access points and a Ubiquiti Edgerouter4 to manage the upgraded 200mb/s on GB fibre broadband.
At Bridget Riley and Britannia Works the existing BT 100mb/s leaseline services were retained as well as the legacy ruckus R500 access points rather than go to additional expense of replacing them all at this point. It still took a while to reset and uppgrade all the old firmware to bring everything up to date. Sara Lane in Hoxton and Triangle on Mare Street in Hackney. These final additions complete the return of all the large studios into our care a total of 13 buildings!
We were also happy to retire very noisy old routers and switches at each location, reducing power consumption in the process. None of the equipment in the coms cabinets had been cleaned nor any of the UPS units been serviced since install some 8 years ago, when Optimity took on these sites, making use of the UK gov voucher scheme designed to uplift broadband connection for business.
Deptford Housing Coop have also been updated from 500mb/s to 1GB wires only service. This meant we could drop the noisy and power hungry Cisco Meraki monster which has prevented comfortable use of the DHC office front of house since install in early 2019, pre pandemic!
Negation, hydridity and transformation are all at play in our current field of view. However, something of a pause has impacted on more regular reporting of activities.
rewind be kind
We have not stopped exploring ideas or sustaining development but the pace of human tragedy unfolding without our local bubble, continues to distract attention and defy comprehension.
Earlier this month Jon Bains was in contact to confirm the relaunch of Obsolete, our web design boutique of the 90’s now AI adjustment consultancy to ‘Work the Future’.
Fourth Portal Workstation 18, St George’s Shopping Centre, Gravesend, DA11 OTB
Few of us are truly better prepared and rehearsed to advise on the transformations ahead than Jon, who has gathered a wide circle of media professionals and marketing moguls to assist. The impact of such radical innovations can’t be underestimated nor should they inhibit our critical thinking and appetite for change.
Today we heard news from Fourth Portal they have confirmed lease on a secondary hybrid interaction lab in Gravesend. Whilst the St Andrew church chapel continues to offer event space there on the riverside, work is already started on adaptation of a disused restaurant just 5 minutes away, where workspace is being prepared for utility over the next 6 months at least.
This years DeptfordX arts festival included over 100 fringe events including the first ever listing for Co-oPepys arts project.
Essential preparation extended to well overdue lick of paint and wall mounting of the many paintings and prints by past members alongside new work of those contributing to the two week exhibition.
All went very well with more visitors to the community arts space than ever, several continuing work together on a starter pack and refurbishment of the website.
Web site Wealth of Negation has been getting a freshen up since pandemic recess. It’s been several years since it was last updated although it’s lead contributors have been busy. Innovations in collaborative authoring, automatic writing and AI are turning all established publishing models on end once again!
Of the many great people we have met through long connection to Cardiacs family of friends, it’s been a pleasure to get reaquainted with Dave Chelsea this year. His lifetime experience building recording studios for others, informed his desire to create a residential production palace of his own that accomodates such varied interests where he can now share these skills.
Late in 2022 he took possession of a grand Victorian church on edge of Salisbury Plain and began fitting it out for live-in recording and celestial sound mixing in a relaxed rural setting. These images barely do the place justice, it is immense, well attuned to it’s ecclectic vicar and a most fabulous retreat for any patrons seeking rehearsal, recording and production.
The glass celebrates arts and music with depictions of life in the warm embrace of creativity. Harsh winter weather was a massive test for Dave as he struggled to move in and draw together a lifetimes collection of production resources to the church.
The huge wood burner was insatiable yet barely took the chill out of the air, so he was pleased the electric heat exchangers worked out. We kept out coats on until Dave offered up a set of hooded fleece cloaks for us to wear over everything, great solution!
This was the view from the guest suite over looking the resources library and mixing studio.
It’s still early days for this great project and the installation process has far to go before operational continuity required is in place. Meanwhile there have been regular sound tests as work with local band The Blunders continue recording their next release.
It’s way out in the country and broadband services are limited so there have been numorous attempts to improve on the basic and rather slow ASDL offered by BT and others.. a 4G equipped router may well be the best option for now.
view from the guest suite to the stained glass window
He promises guided tours for all whom attend the monthly ‘Sunday Service’ socials during the coming summer months for BBQ, country walks and crafted sounds.
Throughout the pandemic John McKeirnan pursued his ambition to establish 4th Portals that explore hybrid public life. The most recent development of which was at CAB, the old Citizen Advice building in Great Yarmouth that is owned by Lewes Workspace.
SPC is helping co-ordinate installation of gigabit fibre lease line and distribution of wireless access throughout the building. The TTB fibre was at last installed in early April 2023 so we recently returned to complete the process and commission the network ready for new tenants.
The ground floor has already been completely refurbished and is ready to be occupied by a couple of local businesses. One is Magic Acorns who run educational, music sessions for mothers and toddlers. The other is a small print shop where students are already gathering to prepare book, poster and leaflet printing.
On the first and second floor there are 16 rooms yet to be refurbished. They also offer wireless access in the anticipation that a well equipped workspace incubator, will foster local enterprise and enthusiasm for adoption of this location for new business!
Meanwhile, John’s 4th Portal project has moved on to the next location at St Andrews Arts Centre in Gravesend, where he will again nurture favour and local support for his special brand of social enterprise.
Since we completed the Mazi pilotback at end of 2018 and refocussed effort onto DigitalMarkers, so many expectations have been disturbed. In the wake of our foolish exit from European Union, covid pandemic and horror of wars in Ukrainian, Yemon etc. it’s perhaps no surprise there is little pressing interest in such offline network research.
However, SPC attempts at seeding the knowledge and experience gained are ongoing with a range of micro server and local network installations.
Both the Dietpi and Open Media Vault projects have paid a particular part in the shaping of these explorations where more reliable broadband and platform development coincide with local network demands. Each presents comprehensive applications that run well enough on Raspberry Pi SBC but even better on repurposed micro PC hardware. Drawing minimal energy at modest cost they are very adaptable and easily interconnected and repurposed where needed.
HP T630 Thin Client
Our original OMV first built in 2010, still runs on a vintage single core xeon HP server class workstation we pulled from a skip. It’s currently hosted at Deptford Housing Coop on their 1GB fibre lease line, where some SPC subscriber ‘timecapsules’ and work in progress is held.. Since first establishing this server at Deckspace we have gone on to build a further 5 for groups we support, where they seek flexibility for locally accessible bulk storage and granular access permited.
At home We run a couple of HP i5 thin clients that get the most vigorous testing and rebuilding as consequence of numorous experimental accidents! ASH holds a set of device monitoring and one of 4 Docker/Portainer kitchens, an SSB room, Meshtastic base node and SRT relay. Our very ancient Synology NAS hasn’t failed us though we keep things very simple there to reduce its flakeyness. It too offers a huge range of plugin services each though impacts performance of the whole all too easily, the DIY alternatives are better suited and empowered.
The earliest DietPi installation where we tested basic thin-client PC’s is at Co-oPepys community arts club. It hosts colleboration documents and archive materials of the charities operation in 60’s Pepys Estate since 1985 at a Nextcloud instance for co-ordination with members.
Over at Brixton Hill Studios their OMV runs on a Dell i5 desktop PC that serves up studio resources for recorded sessions, video production and workstation backup, filling a lot of storage space over the Samba network. Their GB Fibre service from TalkTalk Business also makes it possible to interact with all the vital production files at maximum speed practical from anywhere. The Windmill Brixton, links up over a fast wireless link to share broadband for streaming live shows too!
Studio Gil is a community architecture practice based at Spacestudios in Redbridge Town Hall where design documents and building information management tools are shared between home working and studio based architects. Their OMV runs very well on a repurposed Lenovo i5 ThinkCentre, such a tiny well formed unit, it’s the best for the job we have found so far!
Spacestudios have a large network of Art Studios across East London that increasingly present very fast fibre leaseline or fibre to the premises access over wireless for all their artist tenants.
Where we have been called into oversee fibre installation or upgrade and optimise existing wireless access point infrastructures, it’s been possible to sprinkle a few of these micro PC’s into the mix.
Now we are developing some syndicated platform services for artists their and working partners. Pilot installations in their Timber Wharf and Haymerle buildings are yet to be populated, the retreat from public life has been profound.
We wrapped up research on Digital Markers during covid isolation with launch of the Crumbles Castle pilot (currently offline) and similar Raspberry Pi4 installation at Active Play Hub with Elizabeth Wright at St Martins UAL, utilising DietPi’s excellent platform framework and optimised software library.
Our efforts to pioneer the use of these tools in public for intervention and engagement have yet to catch on as anticipated but have inspired attention and fostered relationships for future collaborations.
A DietPi running on a Pi4 at Voltaire Studios was introduced soon after artists returned to take up residence at the newly refurbished studio complex near Clapham Common.
Pete Gomes is hosting the installation and customising the artist pages to present media sharing and co-aurthoring services for use by those connecting to the studio wireless network.
When we rescued Yoshi’s treasures we transported them for stacking and sorting at Limehouse Town Hall this year, we activated some of his legacy PC storage with OMV. Now we also host collections of newly digitised collections alongside his image library from laptops hard drives etc. This installation now also offers PhotoPrism AI image system to sort chronologically, themed and project albums for us. The further filtering and cataloging of his huge image library of photographs and transparencies is ongoing at Limehouse Town Hall most Wednesdays fron noon.
Most recently we have been supporting some research and development work underway at Signware a printshop at foot of Blackheath Hill, Greenwich. Their OMV runs on a low power PC to hold their numerous client project file directories. There is also a growing repository of vintage print software required to run their wide age range of 3D, cnc cutters, vinyl, wide format colour, T-Shirt and high volume paper printers.
We added an A3 colour inkjet to their collection and appropriated some of their storage space for sorting of recently gifted servers, PC screens and laser printers. Their sibling company MDR Systems designs, manufactures and distributes solar LED street lighting and traffic systems here in South East London, Uganda and Tanzania, more about that here later!
A small group of friends have been sorting the Yoshi stack on the balcony at Limehouse Town Hall since September 2022.
This spring we have taken up the offer of desk space in the ‘top room’ alongside 3 others. There, we will continue with the processing many boxes of flat artwork, photographic prints and transparencies that have been filtered out of the heap.
All the camera equipment and artworks have been catalogued then photographed ahead of the quest to find a long term home. With that in mind we will publish catalogues, promote public viewings and host hands on workshops. It’s not a full time distraction so will proceed in fits and bursts but can’t go on forever!
SPC now hosts up a new Yoshi blog to record the image sorting and build on the rich record he already logged at Yoshizen.wordpress.com.
Somehow between all the many threads we hold open and reported here are several community outreach and one off introductions to account for, not least in case they get forgotten.
During 2022/3 Catbytes were in regular touch seeking network development support for some of their social centre clients and contacts. With their introductions we toured several community centres in Lewisham to help out with broadband troubles.
The first stop was at Honor Oak community centre where the centre manager was struggling to cope with layers of BT installation that over selling of services had introduced. We rationalised all the cables in the office, rationalised the wifi in the building and got the laser printer reconnected!
Barnes Wallace was a wartime hero my dad found fascinating, a munitions engineer with social consciousness who has a community centre in his name in the Somerville Estate in New Cross.
The centre manager Errol is well known for holding regular Martial arts sessions where local families can train together in social centres around Lewisham. Broadband service in the estates and streets locally is really hopeless, basic ADSL but no fast broadband let alone Fiber to the premises (FTTP). We helped them link up rooms in the centre to improve their suitability for youth training and games development classes, yet their broadband connection remains basic.
Next we visited Christchurch Bellingham and met with the jolly Yorkshire vicar Fiona Thomas who also looks after 2 or 3 other local churches. This one is huge timber roofed structure built by Deptford mariners and has a pipe organ which we have yet to get Bill Drake to visit and play! Their address wasn’t even listed when we contacted Community Fibre on their behalf so once it was, they got themselves super fast FTTP broadband for their regular groups and can now also host Catbytes sessions. Their befriending services are most valuable to locals.
Stanstead Lodge is an over 50’s club on the South Circular road in a grand house with substantial gardens. The ground floor has several large rooms for club use and community hire. Catbytes were keen to help them resolve access to the poorly installed FTTP so they could hold more reliable sessions each Friday Morning. We extended their wired network into the cafe and got all their existing equipment working much better. Cafe and garden is well worth a visit !
Most recently we were called in to support the Carers Lewisham group in Forest Hill where their terrible broadband problems had resulted in a lot of frustration and despair for staff after 9 months of service disruption. Promised fibre lease line service just never materialised. Very pleased to report that since our involvement and some careful pushing of their tech supplier all is now much improved and data flows reliably.
We started the new year much as the last was concluded, tending to community networks, sorting media archives and refurbishing a stack of donated decade old iMacs, VOIP phones, HP printers and servers ready for redistribution.
Some have already been put back to work with friends of friends having picked out one or two and others awaiting replacement SSD drives and fresh warez. One or two now run Linux Mint very nicely and so will have an extended life once Apple drop OS X. Others are already defunct.
Inura 2016 Transylvania
Amongst those getting in touch it was great to hear from Mark Sanders at Spectacle. We first met at an Undercurrents workshop in Oxford, 25 years or more ago and then again in Transylvania during 2016’s Inura meetup in Romania. We were there to present Mazi, reviewing it’s beta features whilst tuning to the needs of this unique group.
Mark recently visited the SPC shed on a sunny but chilly afternoon to catch up, then this week several of the iMacs were delivered to the Lavender Hill studio that will usurp his defunct Apple G5 workhorses. What a hoard of vintage video tapes, playback decks and cameras collected there in a bramble of AV cables and catalog of 30 years urban documentary practices.
Post pandemic Mark is keen to reactivate this archive and extend some access to the space for those seeking tape rescue and a rationale for their own collected media. Several hours of hardware surgery and reconfiguration later, the stack of aging drive arrays had been consolidated around a working G5, ready for file sorting and transfer to a yet larger SAN. The stack of analog video Hi8, Betamax, Umatic, tape decks is now re-synced for digitisation duties, alongside digital format devices. Perhaps your collection holds forgotten treasures to release?
Lastly, the Spectable archive online was marooned when flash video format support was abandoned in favout of html5 embedded video formats. Such is the volume of material in the archive another solution may seve better. We looked at pan.do/ra as used for AMP now hosted and operated at MaydayRooms. Their comprehensive system for media cataloging and inline annotation may be just the solution?
Since 2016 we have been in regular contact with Weave 3D special effects and design developers who were based in Bishopsgate but during pandemic condensed the studio and eventually moved out to Hartford. We visited in 2022 to configure LAN access to their new fibre lease line broadband. Enjoyed a grand day out in fine weather in a fascinating and historical town.
In contrast then, a trip to Croydon, where Conditions were preparing a pop up unit of the Whitgift Centre to show their class of 2022 work. David Panos established Conditions, a low-cost studio program for artists. It gives studio space and structured critical conversations to develop each artist’s work, as well as encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration and collective work on exhibitions and events.
Later this month on 26th will be YT 60th birthday and to celebrate we will host a garden picnic at home with friends and family. After so many months without rain we are half expecting to be sheltering throughout, under the car port or in the virus shelter but join us if you can please.
A decade ago we did much the same, enjoying a lovely sunny party though it was such a busy afternoon and evening we didn’t have a chance to stop for a moment and capture images.
When very recently looking through the million of images recovered from Yoshi’s house, discovered a huge set of my 50th. Each shot featured great friends, some meeting up for the first time, others sharing the fun of such a festive reunion. Please have a scan through and find yourselves grinning back.
Droog Alexei Blinov and our Ruby were consumed for some time constructing the reflector telescope that Hackney mates presented me with. Check wild barbecue, tended by Adnan Hadzi, a stack of salads by lovely Lisa and Yoshi’s famous Miso soup all helped keep us sustained between the booze and cake. So many gorgeous people! The daughters were horrified at the recycling bins of all the neighbours brimming with the empties! Well before the evening was done Lurca ignited the 50 charge firework cake. Marvellous!
Our friend Yoshi Zen aka Kinetorori Mamura died in April but it has taken until August before access to his apartment enabled recovery of treasures featured in his blog. Southwark council will be along very soon to dispose of whatever is left, fair enough.
The mass of fabrications materials, electronics and tools we found there surpasses anything we anticipated, for as well as many cameras and lenses were beautiful wire sculptures, embellished circuit boards, sets of printed and cut papers, carved spoons and foil figurines alongside many boxes of magazines, books and documents stored over decades. His collections are now being processed at Limehouse Town Hall – Boxing Club and the very overdue funeral is now booked for September 12th 9.30am at Honor Oak Crematorium SE23. All are welcome.
Brixton Hill Studios is the great independent performance rehearsal and recording studio complex that’s owned by Stephen Gilchrist. A group of dedicated musicians and engineers operate the centre for the many performers who link up there. They are also founder members of AIRRS, the association of independent rehearsal and recording studios.
We share a big love of Cardiacs and it’s family of firm friends that makes for a comfortable exchange of ideas and enthusiasm for social music spaces and cheerful resourcefulness. So it’s been a pleasure to spend time with them, upgrading to gigabit fibre and plumbing in fast network access throughout the building that links the rooms to the studio and CCTV communications.
The last couple of years tested everyone’s resolve and stamina not least those striving to hold together socially oriented enterprises whilst the cash supply to cover running costs evaporated. Everything got fixed though, studio systems were refurbished and new paths of exploration for media streaming from the spaces were activated thanks to support from Arts Council and all of the team at BXHS.
Regular broadband service in Brixton is abysmal (14/2mb/s ADSL at best) so with the huge 1GB capacity they can now also offer some local business access for those within reach of ethernet (100m) or 5.8ghz radio with line of sight. Neighbours Octagon Studios were first to benefit with 100mb/s dedicated connection and improved distribution to their 3 recording suites. The Windmill Brixton pictured distantly above, is a short hop from the rear of the studios which has also been linked up so that live events from their world famous music venue can now be relayed at full quality to mass market streaming services and BXHS own infrastructure.
If you are in the Brixton Hill area and seeking a fast affordable broadband connection without heavy contract in the company of fun and interesting people please get in contact!
I called Charles Hayward after lunch on the day of the recent Albany show to ask if anyone would be filming/recording and he laughed, yes, there was a plan to get a multi track recording though no plan for video. It’s been 7 years since I last filmed Albert Newton live (single camera) and on this occasion Gemma Freeman and the Cosmic Something play first, great. So with little time to prepare I opened up the portable filming kit to check out the options.
old smartphones, sports cameras, mini tripods and USB battery packs.
These tools get infrequent exercise and were collected together with the intention of use as networked cameras along with CCTV and ad-hock media feeds. All get picked up in OBS for live casting via our SPC streaming servers. Instead this time we are going to record as much video as possible from several cameras and cut it all back to the multi-track audio once that is mastered.
To start the Zoom H4 wouldn’t accept the SD card so recovered the H1n from our Laurel and recorded on-stage sound with that instead. All the smartphones were working OK though despite checking out everything before leaving, one of them still failed to write video to micro SD so we lost a great sequence, grrrr! It wasn’t until halfway through ‘Cosmics’ set that this all became apparent, by which stage could have picked out another old phone but in the dark and with show underway brain was more muddled than it should have been!
The 2 HD sports cameras have very wide angle lens so they had to be on the stage with the performers which is just about when it became clear that filming a performance in the round is very different. The musicians trios in both acts faced each other on the rectangular stage, so it was tricky to find a camera positions to keep more than two performers at a time in view.
The Smartphone cameras are more adaptable so they got mounted on some short mic stands kindly provided by Albany crew. Still it was hard to find the views to capture the scenes well. With one smartphone failure it’s the wide angle material most often used but in lower light levels the gain get pushed harder. The biggest shock later was that latest addition MotoG8+ which got used but wasn’t prepared and ships with some awful AI image magic running. It attempts to smooth out the signal and steady the image in frame so looks very different.. ho hum that’s all turned off now!
Once home, was excited to review the clips and drop them to a timeline for composition. Since the show it’s been a rather slow process of pecking away at the tasks of locking the clips into sync with the audio recordings and dropping the camera audio as they tend be overloaded anyway.
So far there are just a couple of rough edits done but as I get back into the swing of the edit software it’s working better. All in all it was a bit too much to handle alone nevertheless a most enjoyable process, I hope others are satisfied with the results so far!
Just to make things a bit more complicated I first used an old i5 iMac to edit one of the performances, running Catalina OSX (so no 32bit final Cut or Premiere) with latest DaVinci Resolve as it’s the only free 64bit editor. For the other used a refurbished mini HP PC running Linux Mint 20 and KdenLive.
The PC just didn’t have enough GPU to run DaVinci anyway and really struggled at first to playback the Kdenlive timeline. I soon discovered that was it because automatically transcoding of the clips that didn’t fit with the edit profile. Similar issues effected the work flow on the iMac but it seemed that in both cases the more work got done layering and previewing the clips, the better they performed. In the end I moved both to the PC where colours have been easier to balance with some filters.
A rough mix of the multi-track recording of Albert Newton made by tech team Albany arrived from Harmergeddon mystro Nathan and once Cosmics return from current tour we hope to add theirs to complete the edits.
Please now see below for completed versions of both.
An evening of genre fluid music curated by local musician and sound activist Charles Hayward.
Music is social space, a helter-skelter ride for the ears. Our line-up this time includes the radical fire groove of Albert Newton, the outsider alt psych power trio Jemma FreemanandThe Cosmic Something.
International players Pat Thomas (keyboards), John Edwards (double bass) and Charles Hayward (drums) are Albert Newton. Immediate, compelling and enticing, this vibrant music continues and develops across a wide range of audiences and spaces including palatial cultural cathedrals, social dance events and scruffy South London pubs, a conscious strategy to break divisions put in place by an avant-garde elite eager to maintain a cultural schism that confirms an avant-garde elite. Initially a quartet, since the death of jazz trumpet legend Harry Beckett in 2010 the group remain a trio, working its way slowly back from a ‘music of absence’ towards a place of resistance and communal joy live in the moment: fire, groove, conviction and strength.
