Six Things, Volume 78

Music | Architecture | Ig Nobel | East Germany | Scrambled Maps | Atonal Bluegrass

Sep 21, 2024

Given that my working life has largely been as a musician, the laziness of my listening habits is disgraceful – unless, that is, I give myself a kick up the arse. My inclination towards things I know I like is of course only encouraged by the algorithm, which is quite happy to provide such content in bucketloads.

So this article by James Hadfield came as a welcome and gentle nudge towards better listening habits. I particularly like the exhortation to ‘listen better’.

(Incidentally, if you’re completely happy listening to nothing but ABBA Gold on a loop, that’s obviously fine, too – this is really just a reminder to myself, but spoken out loud).

Hot on the heels of that article came this, from the BBC – it’s called Orbit, and it’s a fun way of trying out new things without the malign influence of knowing who the artists or genre are before you start listening. It’s guaranteed to give you at least two seconds of something that makes you cock your ear and go ‘ooh, maybe?’, as well as something equally guaranteed to make your ears fall off in protest – but that’s the nature of the thing. If you’re not prepared to endure even a short time listening to something you hate just in case it turns out you like it after all, perhaps it’s not for you.

As if that weren’t enough, here’s a fun app called Radiooooo. Pick a decade and a country and you will be served the appropriate music. Thanks to Steven Rhodes on Bluesky for sharing it.

So there you are. Go forth and listen – no excuses!

Thing 2 – Inside instruments

Architecture is frozen music" – usually attributed to Goethe but apparently coined by Friedrich von Schelling

"[Donald’s music] is like defrosted architecture" – Michael Flanders

I’ve spent the last twenty-five minutes looking at the photographic series Architecture in Music, by photographer and cellist Charles Brooks – ten of them looking for Arrietty and Pod.

The process of making these images is complex and time-consuming. This one, of the inside of a wooden flute made by Maurice Reviol in New Zealand, is made up of 728 individual frames stitched together.

You can find them all here. And they’re available as prints (museum quality or acrylic), posters and a wall calendar.

Thing 3 – Ig Nobel

The Ig Nobel Prize announcement – ‘celebrating achievements which make you laugh, then think’ – is always a bright spot at the beginning of autumn. This year’s highlight is a toss-up between the winner of the Chemistry Prize, which (very much in the spirit of Darwin) used chromatography to separate drunken and sober worms, and the winner of the Peace Prize, which explored ‘the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles’.

The complete list of winners is here and you can watch the prize ceremony here.

Thing 4 – East Germany

For a long time in my childhood – probably until I was about 14 – I didn’t think much about the existence of East and West Germany. It was just one of those things that was. If I did it was probably to wonder why West Germany were so good at football and East Germany so bad. (Or so I inferred from their habitual absence at major championships. When they did qualify for the World Cup, not only did they have a pleasingly and appropriately egalitarian record – 2 wins, 2 draws, 2 losses, 5 goals both scored and conceded – but they also, in the only international meeting between the two teams, beat their Western rivals 1-0. I also learn, on looking it up, that their biggest win in an official match was 12-1 against Ceylon in 1964. East Germany 12 Ceylon 1. A scoreline to conjure with. To briefly co-opt Pinter, another time, another time.)

Two Germanies was one thing; two Berlins just part of the same deal – something quite extraordinary that existed as part of the backdrop of my life. As I grew more aware of world affairs, it did begin to strike me as both fascinating and distinctly odd. But it was only on visiting West Berlin for the first time, early in October 1989, that it properly hit home. Even then, I was still broadly unaware of the internal rumblings that would result, just a few weeks later, in such massive upheaval. In my defence, I wasn’t the only one. In that same month, the French Foreign Ministry concluded that reunification ‘does not appear realistic at this moment’.

Anyway, this is all leading to this remarkable film, made in 1989 – it contains precise instructions for Westerners travelling along the autobahn corridor from the border to West Berlin. I assume travellers were shown it just the once before leaving, and expected to remember and adhere to every detail (‘He will salute you. You must, irrespective of your sex, status or form of dress, return his salute.’) As one who can barely make it through an airport terminal without quadruple checking that I have my boarding pass, I suspect this kind of travel was Not For Me. It’s all a bit ‘if you’re not getting your hair cut you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes to the lower peg’. But obviously much much more serious.

(Quite enjoyably, the auto-generated transcription renders ‘Helmstedt’ as ‘Hampstead’, a misrepresentation which paints a quite different picture.)

Anyway, here it is. If you’re over the age of about 45 it might bring on heady feelings of nostalgia. If you’re younger, replace the word ‘nostalgia’ with ‘bewilderment’.

Thing 5 – Scrambled Maps

This game, in which you have to rearrange eighteen bits of a map, is just difficult enough to be slightly annoying, but not so difficult that you’ll give up in a welter of frustrated tears. (Warning: it doesn’t seem to work so well on phones – I spent a painful and frustrating few minutes trying to complete it before I realised I wasn’t being shown all the tiles.) Courtesy of the always excellent Web Curios.

Thing 6 – Atonal Bluegrass

Talking, as I was in Thing 1, of listening to new things, and especially things you don’t like… I’m not a big fan of country music or bluegrass, and I ever so slightly have to gird my loins to listen to atonal music. But put the two together and you have a winner.