Another example of how piracy has actually energised bands and the music industry to innovate.

“Closeness to God has always been connected with writing music. At the moment there’s no music.”

Pray for him.

Etiquette has it that one doesn’t at the end of movements, only at the end of whole pieces. When asked what the history of this convention was, one composer noted that it ‘had arisen during the 1920s, when music began to move from the church to the concert hall, and the piety of the church came with it.’ When to stand, when to sit, where the hell we are in the prayer book – church-going does nothing if not refine your sense of when the right time to do something is.’

What’s lovely about this is that we’re seeing a reversal: the concert hall has become the church: 30 or 40 years after churches became worried about trendy new people coming in and spoiling the altar cloth, it’s the grand classical halls that are now worried about ruffians ignorant of convention. What’s been their response? To offer an ‘alternative service’ – check out the ‘Night Shift’ concerts given by The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Whatever our position, this asks the question of all of us: what is our reaction to those who receive in a different way to us? Music, worship, art and gifts. Is our mode of reception preventing others from sharing?

_______

See also from the archives: ‘On Music‘

And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject

Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe

To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others

Relativity,

Two clocks moving apart

At light speed never separate

And, in time, are forever together.

Yes, Albert,

As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,

You locked us in:

No information shall travel faster than light,

Yes, our infinity, given a limit:

46.5 billion light years

To the edge

Of us.

But you are there, and I here,

And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,

A new spacetime arcs out,

Socking the eye with an infinite number of

Observable universes.

And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.

Some mother said I was unique, but now

A father’s physics wants me to believe in

Another me,

Beginning 10 to the 10

to the 29 metres far away.

Too far, and yet too close,

For my comfort.

Quantum physicist,

Hugh Everett III, what have you done?

“The existence of other universes

is inevitable”

Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,

Which denied too the objective reality

Of wavefunction collapse.

And I’m like, WTF?

You go on:

“Between 0 and 1:

A single random number

With all its infinite decimals,

Is expressed, computationally,

Longer

Than

The computational expression

Of the whole set of numbers

That exist there.”

Meaning?

Apparently this:

A universe of infinite parallels

May be more economic

Than a straight, linear,

Singular

One.

Meaning?

Somewhere you and I are together,

Though, in this universe, we are apart,

And somewhere else there are more in betweens

Than we could ever fathom.

And that may be more efficient

Than this.

And now my gourd is swirling,

Thinking,

What is love, and life and us,

Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,

And chose to forego

In the infinite possibility

Of the efficient multiverse,

And dig long

And deep

For life,

And love,

In this

One?

Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett

Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I’d been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see.

The brilliant folky-dub got me thinking about ideas of proximity, and the value we place on it. Being physically near costs. If you want to be at the front, within touching distance, you are going to have to pay a huge amount more. Sitting near the front of a meeting says something; the physical layout of the space insists on it. Most of us are left wallowing at the back, with restricted views.

And somehow my mind skipped to the second coming; it struck me that one of the most powerful arguments against a standard physical interpretation of the second coming is this idea of limited proximity. We couldn’t all get anywhere near close. Rich and powerful Jews like Maxwell get buried in the hugely costly cemetery on the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, overlooking the spot where Elijah is meant to return, and one feels that there would be a similar stampede for wherever the JesusShip™ decided to land.

We used to joke back in old-church about good deeds pushing you forward a couple of rows. No. Whatever we might think about eschatology, or post-life experience, SpaceTime must collapse, and ideas of distance and proximity will be irrelevant.

Strange where thoughts take you when you’re tired at a wonderful gig.

Technorati: Escatology | Iron and Wine | Jerusalem | Proximity | Robert Maxwell | Shepherds Bush

I love the look of fierce concentration

on the faces of musicians,

playing live,

struggling to hear the foldback,

straining to keep within

the bounds of the beat…

The rush of performance

and I think of my own struggles

to live life,

playing live,

no click track.

This is not a recording.

The energy and passion,

with the bum notes,

make me… live.

Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These are all the hallmarks found branded on the urban belly. We’d be foolish to try to pare them. London wouldn’t expect us to stop and stare in the face of car bombs. Crowds and spectacles, criminality and terrorism. Londinium’s clay has been trodden on and burnt by them for millennia. It’s a wise and rooted place.

On Thursday and Friday I was fortunate enough to see the resurrection of two of the city’s iconic buildings:

A friend who helps manage them generously gave us entry to see Snow Patrol at the o2 Arena – under the shadow of the New Labour folly, the Millennium Dome. The Dome was the very manifestation of Blairite spun-sugar. Apparent substance and meaning, under the taut umbrella of emptiness. The new arena, thank goodness, is a huge success. Excellent sound quality, great facilities, good views in, for us South-of-the-River types, a great location. London took the boil of the Dome, has lanced the spot, and forced serious thought to prevail.

Further up-stream, on Friday, another friend who is director of development at the South Bank, took us to see one of the many events to celebrate the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall. St. Etienne have been artists in residence there during the reconstruction, and ‘This Is Tomorrow‘ was the film/orchestral piece that came out of it. It was fantastic. The orchestra was made up of local school children, and the film drew on the history of the site and the 1951 Festival of Britain that saw the place redeveloped for the first time. (Afterwards we caught up with Pete and Jonny from Ikon, Mobsby, and Jonny and Mike from Sad-Dad cardigan-clubbers Grace. They’d both been to a similar event at the National Film Theatre)

Both the Dome and the RFH were built to celebrate. Both were done rather hurriedly. One to re-invigorate a nation after an horrifically draining just war. The other to hype a nation into a frenzy just before the hope-sapping debacle of a very different war. But, I felt, both now were beginning to shine with a new vision, one that stood defiant in the face of threats, and one that genuinely spoke to the hurting heart of our country and invited it in to simply be. Good public spaces need to do that. They allow us space and time to sit and relax and watch and quietly interact with ‘the other’, thus re-inspiring us with the divine vision for what a city is about: humanity and divinity in a combined creative project.

London’s soil is tilled and dug and bombed and bulldozed. We shape-shift it into buildings – projected images of ourselves and our times. And London silently takes it, knowing that long after we have gone it’s stories will still be told. But, even as we vainly do so, and even though others will try to destroy it, this great city keeps evolving. It’s my hope that in some way those of us who are involved in it can in some small way nudge it towards something better for all people. It’s a vision I unpack in much more detail in the book and so, on the day it finally gets onto the shelves, I hope it can somehow infect our collective vision for the city, which is more than the place that’s ‘not rural’, but the symbolic place of our co-existence with God.

[Thanks Abi and Karen]

Technorati: Etienne | London | o2 | Bombs | Royal Festival Hall | Snow Patrol | Terrorism

Well worth a podcast or download. For one week only.

In reply to a question about his music being ‘spiritual’ he admits to be being an ‘evangelical atheist’ but that he is ‘jealous of the spiritual experiences the religious have access to.’ His recent work seeks to provide ‘Secular Spiritual places.’

[Unlucky mate, you were on the Vaux playlist frequently ]

Technorati: Eno

One machine intrigued me: a VHS / DVD / Hard-drive player in one. We’ve clearly got format-change overload here. I’m only surprised it didn’t have Blue-Ray and Laserdisc capability too. It played CDs too… if it had only had cassette and vinyl…

No doubt I’ll switch soon. There are those who are always early adopters, but most of us continue to live ‘within’ a format while new ones become properly established…

As we do so, developers are always keen to push the envelope of that particular format. The rise of interactive DVD games / videos for kids is a good example. It simply couldn’t be done on tape.

There comes a time though, when the envelope reaches its limits; when what we really want to do with the content just doesn’t fit the format we’re working with. So we take the plunge. We digitize our vinyl. We rip our CDs. We put the 35mm camera away for the last time. We put the VHSs in the loft.

It’s usually a painful and slow process. Some data usually doesn’t make it in the transfer. Other things suddenly look much better. Now I can easily digitize and manipulate them, Super 8 cine film has got a new lease of life.

Everything we do has some kind of ‘format’, and church is no exception. Traditional Sunday service? The envelope has been pushed to the limit. The format is just not suitable for the way we want to interact with the content. I’m done with it. I’ve switched.

The first switch was the hardest. The first time you go from analogue to digital I think it always is. Vaux was a pretty niche format, infinite wow and flutter, but not robust. It had to go too. And some data has inevitably been lost. Much, however, has been regained. A digital faith allows you to scan quickly and re-discover some long-forgotten material. It’s been good to have a break between formats. Stops you getting straight back in the rut you just left. We’re slowly evolving something new post-Vaux.

And here’s where I burn my Emerging Church credentials, stick my neck out and disagree with Marshall Mcluhan: I don’t think the medium is the message. (Though I do agree with Jonny and Ryan that church practices are accomodations to a society that no longer exists) The medium, the format, allows certain aspects of the message to be enhanced, but the message underlying these formats remains the analogue truth that no ear can fully hear and no eye can fully see. Even in HD.

Our dark glasses and mufflers will remain for now. And while they do it is imperative on us to keep pushing the envelope of whatever format we are living within, and having the courage to jump to new ones when we know the limit is reached.

Technorati: Format | Marshall MacLuhan | Digital | super8 | Vaux