This is half-pie.

I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately. The Wellington City Library carries a huge range of graphic novels and collections, and it’s been good to catch up with old favourites like Ennis, Moore, and Ellis after a good ten years away from the medium.

But if all I was reading was superhero stuff I’d have to say that I haven’t missed that much. Luckily though, there are unexpected delights out there, away from the increasingly tedious bods in tights.

When I was in the library the other day a new title caught my eye: Phonogram: Rue Britannia. The cover seemed familiar; and yes, it is: a remix of an old Pulp album cover.

The story: it’s brilliant.

So, what if music itself were a thing of magic?

You know this makes sense. We all have songs that do things to us, emotionally and physically, that seem magical (like my first ever listen to Primal Scream’s Loaded)¹. So, if you’re a Phonomancer that’s the magic that you use.

David Kohl is a Phonomancer. Britannia, the goddess that made him, died with Britpop years earlier. David’s current existence centres around himself and misusing his powers to pick up girls in bars, until THE Goddess finds him, curses him (with PMS!), and sends him off to find out what’s happening to dead Britannia, who is apparently being “interfered” with.

The writing is packed with brit-pop-culture references – but hopefully not enough to weigh down the experience for readers not immersed in those times. The black & white artwork is beautiful and spare; not a line out of place but capable of displaying great emotion and humanity. And also lots of hot punk chicks.

Perhaps one of my favourite parts of the story is about Beth, a former(?) obsessive Manics fan part of whom remains trapped in the era holding out for the return of Richey Manic. There’s a lovely sub-plot there about growing up and letting go that is really quite beautiful.

As one who spent a good proportion of my disposable income in the 1990s on obscure and not so obscure British music² this book pushes all my buttons. It’s the best comic book I’ve read in years. But I must remember, as Emily Aster, another phonomancer in David’s coven, says: “Nostalgia is an emotion for people with no future”.

Even so, I’m off to the comics shop tomorrow to see if I can find a copy of Rue Britannia and the followup collection for myself.

And the rest of you: please form a orderly queue behind me.

• Read the first part here.
• And a much better review of the book may be found here.

¹ Hell, for me sometimes even the right chord change can bring on a numinous moment (like that change in Ride’s Moonlight Medicine–one of only two good songs on their album Carnival of Light–that I was trying to explain the goodness of to Bella at the weekend).

² A confession: I also was at Knebworth for those Oasis concerts. Which means I actually do, sadly, feature in this very comic book.

I’m still ripping my CDs and occasionally finding inadequate cover art for them. After the comments to the last lot of album covers I posted I’ve been going back through all the CDs I’ve already done and re-doing them at 320kbps. Just, you know, because that’s so much fun.

As before, the following are roughly 200×200 pixel thumbnail linking to the roughly 1000×1000 original.

Deconstructed: An Acoustic Album —You know how, after the whole family goes to the Warehouse, crap just seems to appear in the car. This is one of those.

Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff: Dizzy —Sadly, it took the addition of Vic Reeves to the line-up for the Wonder Stuff to get their first UK Number 1. This is actually a pretty cool song all the same, a cover of some ancient ditty.

We Know Where You Live: Draped —Detect a theme here? We Know Where You Live was a post-breakup splinter of the Wonder Stuff, back in the mid ’90s. Before the Super Furry Animals, it was The Wonder Stuff that was the target of my obsessive completism…

3Ds: Fishtales / Swarthy Songs For Swabs —Perhaps unsurprisingly there seem to be few decent quality pix of these 3Ds covers.

3Ds: Hellzapoppin —Outer Space!

3Ds: The Venus Trail —Spooky!

The Phoenix Foundation: Horse Power —And the covers that are available for this, the first album from these guys, are all of the American reissue… and nowhere near as cool as the original New Zealand version.

Voice Of The Beehive: Monsters And Angels —This band used to be one of my little guilty secrets. Maybe not so much the album this single came from (I’ve since sold it) – I think it got the SAW treatment – but their earlier one I still listen to.

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: National Bank Series —This from 2004, a CD picked up while I was working at the National Bank; on it Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty and Piano Concerto No. 1. (They were a lot classier in those days.)

New York Philharmonic/Zubin Mehta; Montserrat Caballé & Peter Wimberger: Excerpts from Der Ring des Nibelungen —Bombastic. But sometimes, oh so good. I first heard this music in Boorman’s Excalibur), and it’s stayed with me ever since.

Therapy: Nowhere (Sabres Of Paradise Remixes) —Punk Metal, as remixed by Weatherall et. al. Another (attempted) completist purchase.

Passion Fish: Soundtrack —Years and years ago we saw this at the Film Festival. Can’t remember much of the film, but the music made an impression. A compilation of Zydeco / Cajun tracks.

Peaches: So This Is Love —Another of those “Warehouse” purchases – it’s a whole lot of covers performed by NZ female artists flogged as a Valentines Day album a few years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it. Though maybe I should.

Suede: So Young —Back when Suede were supposed to be the next Smiths (how old am I to still wish for “the next Smiths”?) I started in collecting all their EPs as they came out.

Suede: Stay Together —And here’s another; but also one of those rare things in modern times: a non-album single. Just like the Smiths, in fact.

Ruia & Ranea: Waiata Of Bob Marley —Thanks to my high school buddy Jeff, I’m left with Bob tunes etched in my head. These are versions in Te Reo, and the only Bob in my collection, currently (this is an unfortunate omission).

William Orbit: Water From A Vine Leaf —An early appearance of Beth Orton; and a very lovely track it is too.

Punks Not Dad: We Are The Dads —The debut album from my other favourite Welsh band, as mentioned a year or so ago, and of course I can’t resist mentioning here the video for their awesome song, In Me Shed.

That might be the last of these though – I’m nearly done with the ripping. Phewf!

In the mail this week, an interesting envelope arrived from my (ex-) bank, the National Bank.

It was thick, and rustled slightly.

“It’s nice to know some things in life are free”?

Intriguing.

But what could the bank be sending me?

Blah blah blah. Just a letter for some new product. The usual sort of thing.

But wait! What’s that behind the letter? There’s something else in here!

Hey, maybe it’s the free thing they talked about on the envelope!

Errr, no.

Just a little bag stuck to a piece of card, helpfully labelled “Air”.

And I feel like I’ve been trolled.

(I leave it up to the reader to decide whether I paid any subsequent attention to the actual content of the letter.)

And still, here I am ripping my stuff.

Sometimes, bands put out bonus DVDs with a few videos on them – like Coldplay’s X&Y Australian Tour Edition from a few years ago. There are several audio tracks on here that I don’t otherwise have – and so the question becomes how to rip these so I can listen to them in the usual manner¹.

I’d done this several years ago, but had noticed that the result seemed slightly slowed down, something that probably related to the different sampling frequency of the source material. The DVD audio seemed to be sampled at 48,000Hz, but regular CD audio is at 44,100Hz (I think), and so if any part of the lengthy chain of transcoders is assuming it’s dealing with CD audio then there’s a problem.

I think I’ve sorted it now. I’m sure there’s a better way, but here’s what I did on my Mac:

• Mac The Ripper – this can be used to separate (demux) the video and audio. At the end of this process you should have a large .pcm file containing all the audio tracks as well as a video file you can discard.
• Audacity – import the PCM file as “raw data”, making sure you set the sampling frequency to 48,000Hz in the appropriate import dialog.

At this point you’ll have to select each song separately out of the one long audio file and “Export Selected…” in Audacity. It’s a bit of an interesting exercise if you haven’t done it before (I’m sure Audacity has better ways of doing this too, though I haven’t delved that far as yet). You can export as MP3 / WAV etc etc – I did two exports, one to Apple’s lossless WAV equivalent AIFF for archival purposes, and another to 320kbps MP3.

I’m glad I only have to do this once.

Later: So much for knowing what I was doing. The next one I tried, the DVD version of the Super Furry Animals Rings Around The World turned out to have a variety of audio encodings resistant to the above. I’ve ripped it once before, several years ago, but to a less than adequate quality. Unfortunately I can’t remember how I did it. Back to the drawing board!

¹ The question as to whether or not it’s actually worth the bother I’ll leave aside for now.

As mentioned, I’ve been ripping all my CDs to some sort of quality level that means I won’t have to do it again for a while (sadly, I don’t quite have enough disk space for FLAC, but that’s another story).

One slightly annoying issue is that some CDs have hidden tracks that can be almost impossible to rip. I’m talking here about those tracks that are hidden before the start of track one on the CDs hosting them. In order to hear one you need to scrub backwards past the beginning of track one using your old CD player, and eventually you’ll find it. They’re in what’s known as the “pre-gap“, a space that supposedly should be 2 seconds long, but in which it was discovered whole tracks could be placed.

Most software based music players will not detect these tracks, so you can’t find them with iTunes and the like. Therefore it’s quite possible you may even own CDs with these tracks and not know it – here’s a list.

Mine (that I know of) is the Super Furry Animals album “Guerrilla“; the hidden track is called “The Citizen’s Band”, a little ode to CB radio whose melody borrows heavily from an earlier song. So not the Eldorado of hidden tracks, but then not getting it would be an affront to my completist sensibility around SFA, my long-term favourite band.

Cutting to the chase: it turns out that it is possible to get these tracks. Special software is required:

• Windows: Exact Audio Copy – instructions here
• MacOSX: XLD – instructions here
• Linux (& MacOSX MacPorts): CDParanoia – commandline fun for all!

One additional problem: not all hardware can actually extract these tracks correctly. My two Macs, though both with different optical drives, eventually extracted what seemed to be full sized files, spewing lots of disk errors as they did so, but the files actually turned out to be silent. This is apparently quite common, and you may have to try lots of machines before finding one that works.

I found one eventually, though not at home… and now I have the track ripped and safe in its new place of repose. Clearly, my life is complete. For now.

So I’ve been listening to Kristin Hersh / Throwing Muses for 21 years now. It’s been a long journey for everyone, and I’ll admit I haven’t bought anything of hers for a while now. I still follow her on Twitter though; and it was here I learnt of her new album, Crooked.

It’s a book, a beautiful little hardback book with a code inside to download the album itself.

The object-collector inside of me, the one I’ve tried to suppress in the last few years as the sheer weight of all our material possessions have started to oppress me, awoke. Kristin in her Twitter feed linked to a British Amazon-variant selling Crooked with free international postage; the object was paid for and duly arrived last week.

It is lovely.

As befitting the velvet flower photos inside, the thing even smells nice. And unlike all my CDs, which are destined to be moved into a box in the ceiling shortly, this book will remain in the bookshelf for repeat viewing.

What’s also really nice about all this is the exploration of new and different ways to distribute music. In a post-CD era, how can an artist accrue more income? Kristin has been exploring ways to directly connect with her fans for about a decade now, long before “social media” was invented, all in a low key way that looks like it has created a sustainable income for her family. I like what she’s doing, a lot.

And the music: it’s good. All the instruments played by the artist; the songs have an angular beauty that on repeated listens is digging deeper inside my head.

Here’s a video for the title track of the album, a glorious rolling rhythmic track; Kristin’s voice older now, whether richer through experience or weary with it I’m not always sure.

Crooked in the studio from kristin hersh on Vimeo.

And in keeping with the ethos of the artist, the video is credited to her boys. How wonderful is that?

At the moment though, the song that is most snagged in my head is Flooding, an incredibly haunting song of breakup and loss. I’ve embedded a down-sampled version here (all tracks are Creative Commons licensed, which means I can share this here without fear of RIAA attack-dogs):

Somehow along the way this purchase has become participation, and that actually makes me feel pretty good.

I’ve been busy ripping all my CDs so that we can store them away for good. They just fill up shelf and draw space and just don’t get used, as all the music I actually listen to is now in digital format.

But the more CDs I do, the more a sneaking suspicion grows that I should have been ripping them at 320kbps rather than the 190kbps (with high quality VBR enabled so they come out somewhere between 205 and 220kbps).

That aside, the other problem is obtaining the cover art. With higher quality displays in portable music devices, and user interfaces like Coverflow in iTunes, decent cover art is becoming pretty important. I reckon that anything less than 300 pixels wide is just not good enough.

I’ve been using Marc Liyanage’s Album Artwork Assistant to find cover art; it searches Amazon and Google for the images. If that’s not sufficient you can use a web search hone your search down a bit. Once you’ve chosen the image it will copy it to the album of your choice.

I’ve picked up lots of good cover art this way. But there’s a few CDs that are either too obscure to have decent, or indeed any cover art. I spent a happy afternoon photographing some of these a while back, and I present the results here for Google to find. Hopefully then they’ll be useful for someone else.

With each of these I’ve have a roughly 200×200 pixel thumbnail linking to the 1000×1000 original.

Angylion Hardd: Adennydd Mawr… (Angels With Big Wings…) —At the end of a Super Furry Animals Gig in a tent in a park in Cardiff in 1997 (The Fall as support!), we were stumbling around in the dark when a chap pressed this into our hands. It’s a compilation CD for Welsh label Ankst, and I’m looking forward to listening to it again.

Beth Orton: Best Bit EP —This is a rather lovely CD of songs she did with Terry Callier – very soul-y but still Orton. It includes a nice version of “Dolphins”, a track that Billy Bragg had covered earlier.

Curve: BlackerThreeTracker CD2 —Somewhat embarrassing now, but I used to really like these guys. In 1992.

Kylie Minogue: Confide in Me CD2 —I surprised myself by actually buying this. I told myself, at the time, it was because of the St Etienne cover (“Nothing Can Stop Us”) on the b-side, but in truth I actually quite liked the single.

Deepgrooves: Deepgrooves —The “seminal” early ’90s compilation that really changed what we all thought was possible from New Zealand music. For some reason there were no hi-res versions of this cover available anywhere.

Therapy?: Die Laughing —There’s nothing unusual about the music – it’s mostly album stuff – but the packaging is great. Like one of those cheesy greeting cards, it lets rip with a maniacal laugh when you open it up.

Curve: Die Like A Dog —Another Curve EP; this one was a bonus pack-in with their first album. Not sure if I’ll ever listen to it, but you never know.

Mazzy Star: Fade Into You —This song. It chills and burns, at the same time. I don’t have another thing by Mazzy Star, save this.

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons (NZSO Chamber Orchestra) —Back when I used to work for the National Bank, once upon a time, we all got given this CD. Light classical, but not to be sneezed at.

The Fall: Why are People Grudgeful? —I used to have a lot more of the Fall, but over time its somehow evaporated. It’s a great single: four ace songs, one of them a cover of “Lost in Music”. Imagine that.

Jan Hellriegel: It’s My Sin —I feel bad saying this, but the only reason this is still in my CD collection is that I have a hard time bringing myself to sell NZ music.

Billy Bragg: Live In Canada —This was a bonus CD with Don’t Try This At Home – four much loved older songs performed, uh, live.

Daily Telegraph/Timeout: The Main Stage Festivals Sampler 1997 —Sadly, possession of this CD means that I cannot claim never to have purchased a copy of The Daily Telegraph. That aside, it’s a handy CD containing a few tracks that I like without having to buy whole albums of now irrelevant stuff. We never did get to any of these festivals though.

Jay Clarkson/Breathing Cage: Misericord —The album that emerged some years after Jay Clarkson and Breathing Cage won the Rheineck Rock Award and a rather large recording grant. It didn’t light many fires when it came out, but I’ve always liked it.

Goldenhorse: Riverhead —A classic New Zealand pop album which occasionally reminds me a little too much of The Sundays and Harriet Wheeler. Still.

I like this, the older cover for this album, whereas all the covers currently available on the internet have the reissue version with a generic band photo instead.

The Independent: A Taste Of Ireland —For some reason, in the late ’90s all the English broadsheets were giving away CDs. Only mindless and anal geekery can explain my need to photo “cover art” for this, and then put it online here. I am weird.

Beth Orton: She Cries Your Name —The haunting first single. It’s still a bloody spooky song. After William Orbit’s Water From A Vine Leaf I was well pleased at the time to discover Ms Orton now had some shiny new solo recordings.

Flying Nun: The Sound Is Out There —This was a mid-nineties freebie compilation that may have been a pack-in with Flying Nun albums sold at the time. I can’t really remember.

Delta Lady: Swamp Fever —“Delta Lady”, like “Secret Knowledge”, was another pseudonym for Kris Needs and Wonder Schneider, part of the loosely connected scene around Andrew Weatherall and the Sabres of Paradise. After obsessing for some years about Weatherall and his remixes I became inclined to buy almost anything connected to him. Which, thankfully for my bank balance, wasn’t that much here in Wellington.

Björk: The Best Remixes… etc —I can’t bring myself to type out the whole title. But there’s more Sabres stuff on here.

The Ukrainians: Pizni Iz The Smiths —As the title says – it’s the Smiths, but in a Ukrainian folk music style. Weird, but had some mid-90s indie cred due to the presence of some guy from the Wedding Present.

Grant McLennan: Watershed —I feel a little bereft as I look at this. A random memory surfaces: Grant McLennan in concert at Sammy’s, in Dunedin during the very early 90s, some sort of solo acoustic tour with Dave Dobbyn in support. Dave appeared to be completely trashed (those dark years before Dave became the undisputed, uh, national treasure he is now) and he was being comically disruptive and making Grant crack up.
… round and round, up and down, through the streets of your town…

Kitchens of Distinction: When In Heaven —Nice swirly shoegazy type stuff with actual tunes.

Stand by – I may have some more later.

It’s been a long while since I’ve done one of these; and the meme has passed, though the music continues: Mash Wednesday being that time when I post a single tasty mashup to halfpie.net.

Today: the Pixies get souled…

I’m a massive fan of DJ Zebra – I love the left-field combinations he works. I also quite like getting the odd bit of french-language pop vitamins in my day, and he provides that too.

But this is a prime example of the left-field combo (apologies for the lack of an interesting video):

This really really works for me. Let’s get it on with the Pixies, here! And another recent standout Zebra track is this: Bob Marley vs. Soft Cell, also indispensable. In fact, just go to DJ Zebra’s site and explore.

Last time: Radiohead’s Creep remixed

Next time: 80s synthpop meets… nouveau 80s synthpop?….

Note: yes, I know that the polls have closed for this year… but I found this draft posting which I was going to enliven after the article I wrote for the Forest & Bird website went live. But for various reasons that didn’t happen for a of couple weeks after I wrote this, and then I forgot about it. For my own records, there’s also the Facebook page, and a posting on the Wellingtonista too… but as we know, in the end, the Kiwi won, though the Kārearea did get into the top 10 for the first time ever…

It’s time once again to vote for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year over on the NZ Forest & Bird website. Voting starts tomorrow and goes through until October. (I’ll get the link sorted out when the voting page comes live.)

This year I’m taking a more active role in all of this: I am officially the campaign manager for the New Zealand Falcon, the Kārearea.

As part of all this I’ve convinced one falcon to join Twitter. While he may have entirely the wrong idea about Twitter (to him I think it sounds like the perfect place to find food) he’s happy to talk, for now. Follow @kakarapiti.

I’ve also had to write a campaign opening “speech” for the Forest & Bird website…

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Kārearea

No animal should to be anthropomorphised – but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Kārearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.

It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Kārearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children. Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles’ Harrier?

Luckily the Kārearea is not as large and physically threatening as these birds, though it still has its moments. In defense of their nests the falcons are utterly fearless, and will remove hat, hair, and chunks of scalp tissue from any human daring to get too close. (There’s many a back-country musterer become unhorsed from accidentally riding across a nesting territory, though you’ll seldom hear tell of it. Their dogs get a fair share too: I’ve heard of one dog being unable to shake the falcon gripping its back until it jumped off a bluff into the nearest creek.)

Unlike most of our native birds, they actually seem contemptuous of humans. Once I tried walking up to one sitting on a fence post. It let me get to within about five metres of it before it gave a couple of wingbeats, enough to lift it over to the next fencepost; and all the while its eyes were on mine. I advanced on it, and again it beat to the next post. After a couple of repeats of this though, it took off, slowly flying away as if it felt I was of little interest and even less threat.

In hunting too, they are fearless predators, taking on much bigger birds on the wing. I’ve been told of watching a duck, trying to fly up out of a creek; it was high above the water when the falcon slammed into it from above. With talons jammed into its back and the weight of the falcon bearing down on it, all the duck could do was allow itself to be ridden down to the ground, and certain death.

Once, I walked across a ridgeline and paused for a rest, looking into some dead trees in the gully below, full of noisy roosting blackbirds. Over my right shoulder a dark silent shape sped past and down, at the last minute voicing its hunting cry “ki-ki-ki-ki-ki”. An upwards startle of birds met the falcon at equal height and a catch was made, as easy as that.

So by now you must be thinking: why should I vote for this steely-eyed assassin? Why should the Kārearea be 2009 Bird of the Year?

It’s simple. We need the wild.

New Zealand is not a garden: it needs the feral and free along with the pretty and cute. It needs a hint of danger, sharp of eye and red of claw, to leaven the sweetness of voice and plumage of the other candidates.

Yet there’s fewer and fewer falcons about, with the usual catalogue of introduced predators, together with newer threats like power lines, reducing their population. Falcons need our help.

And, help given, think of the benefits of a larger, stable population! Even us city dwellers might start to see more of them as permanent residents, more than just the occasional visitors Blenheim, Palmerston North and Christchurch have enjoyed recently. And while possibly not everybody would be happy to see them, to many people they’d be a fantastic addition to the avian fauna of our cities.

A resident falcon could:

• sort out, permanently, that rooster next door that wakes you up in the morning;
• dispose of those hooligan sparrows destroying your cherry flowers;
• scare off that juvenile tuī that mimics a car alarm;
• render to pile of windblown feathers the starlings nesting in your roof; and
• clean its beak on that blackbird that crapped elderberries on your clean washing.

Bring it on, I say. Vote Karearea!

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So. I think you should vote too. Hopefully for the kārearea; but then again it’s all about having a little fun and raising awareness, so vote for whatever you like. Just vote though, OK?

I just can’t stop singing this song: it’s insanely catchy, and the kids love it too:

It’s from They Might Be Giants‘ new children’s CD of science-themed tracks, which arrived for us from Amazon earlier in the week. Recommended!