off to TEDGlobal 2009
I’ve been a bad blogger the last couple of weeks. It’s been a busy time: I’m leaving today for Oxford where TEDGlobal 2009 runs July 21st-24th. As TED’s music director (great gig!) I contact, book and organise the musicians who play between speakers over the four days of TED. This year we’ve got some great music, including Sophie Hunger, Radio Science Orchestra, and Imogen Heap; also a teenage euphonium virtuoso, an East African war child-turned-rapper, and Felix’ Machines which are mechanical marvels that play gorgeous sequenced music using found car parts, piano hammers and LEDs. Looking forward to seeing my old friend and former percussionist Clif Brigden will be there DJing the whole event. And Kathleen has a full TED ticket this year, which she says she values more than any vacation anywhere in the world.
My son Graham just made his music festival debut at Latitude with his bin drumming group Bin There Drummed That. Sixteen kids dance around a circle and bang the heck out of plastic wheelie bins. He’s off for his second day there. Last night he witnessed a Patrick Wolf set, much to the annoyance I am sure of his older sibling Harper, now in the US, who is PW’s biggest fan and has photos of him plastered all over her bedroom wall. (Her annoyance will increase Tuesday when Graham and Talia get to see a live talk at TED by her other big hero, Stephen Fry. Thank heavens Eddie Izzard turned TED down–Harper would have committed harikiri.)
I’ve been digging Imogen Heap’s new album ‘Ellipse’ the last few days. It won’t be out for a few weeks but she was good enough to send me one (replete with with one of the infamous seals with my name on!) Some really fantastic tracks on there–my faves so far are Little Bird and Bad Body Double–all recorded by Immi herself in her lovely Georgian oval house, and extensively blogged, vlogged and tweeted about in every detail.
I’m writing this while I wait for my hard drive to back up so I can head off to the railway station. After Oxford I’m heading up to Scotland to do some recording with Eddi Reader, one of my favourite singers on the planet. I don’t know yet what key she’s going to want to sing in, so I have to bring a mini Logic setup, which I was preparing this week. In the midst of all this I had a complete computer meltdown and though my album material is all safely backed up, I lost a couple of applications for which I now can’t find the disks. This could have caused a problem for my Eddi sessions were it not for Eric Persing of Spectrasonics who kindly offered to FedEx me a new set of Omnisphere disks in Oxford, using my old serial number. So kind of him!
After Eddi I’m staying in Scotland for the National Championships of my yacht racing class the Loch Long One Design. I’ll be staying with the class Commodare on the shores of the Clyde, and crewing on #141 Fiona as the seaworthy English take on the fearsome Scots. Then August it’s back to work on my album in the Nutmeg of Consolation, as I try to pass the elusive notional halfway mark.
Yesterday was Lunesse’s birthday, my fabulous web mistress and Forum moderator. Happy Birthday darling!
July 19th, 2009 at 1:52 am
” the musicians who play between speakers” don’t all musicians have speakers? boom boom.
I’d give just about anything to hear the musical acts @TED Global. Immi and RSO! and the others all sound interesting too. Not that you need it but good luck with it all, both Oxford and Scotland, hope you have a ball, as I’m sure you will
July 19th, 2009 at 2:44 am
good luck with the race geezer! hope all goes well in jockland,and you bring home the trophy.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:40 am
Here’s hoping that this year’s musical acts will be posted on the TED site soon! Will you be playing with any of them this year, or are you just the ring leader this time out?
Smooth sailing!
Beech
July 19th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Bin There Drummed That are a hoot! I Googled them and found some videos.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Oh dash it!
I was working on the new Jaguar XJ launch last week and one of the guys I work with is working on TED. Too late for me this time around but hopefully I will be working on next years event. I hear that the event is split up across 3 venues in Oxford. Will that mean the music is split up or will there be a single venue for the music?
Great news about Graham. Another star in the making!?
Hope the Eddi Reader sessions go well.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Have fun at TED Thomas. Btw, have you noticed that the just-revealed costume for the forthcoming 11th Doctor Matt Smith has more than a passing resemblance to your look circa Golden Age of Wireless? I suppose the Doctor does do his fair share of blinding people with science…
July 20th, 2009 at 11:33 am
You’re a fine blogger, Thomas! Better quality than quality, I think. By stark
I’m a little brain-fried…I got the cables
contrast, I’ve never written a blog at all…that the public were allowed to
see…actually, I wanted to write one about my newly-rebuilt computer,
but I couldn’t figure out how to get to it! Click my Yahoo! avatar, I think,
but I can’t find that either.
connected last night, plugged ‘er in [with the side-panel off so I could
make sure all the fans were spinning--I once fried a CPU because its
fan wasn't connected], then waited to hear a hearty BEEP! And there it
was. Whew!
Arghhh, hardware and software problems, eh? That was lovely that
Eric Persing replaced your software! Now *that* is customer service.
I have a lot of software to install, myself, that is, after the operating
system and drivers. It’s gonna take a while–restart, restart, restart!
~~ Peace always, Kara
July 20th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Er…better quality than *quantity*!
Now there’s an interesting
Freudian slip. Say, ya know what my *own* definition of a Freudian slip
is? What Freud wore around the house when the missus was away.
Just popped by to second those belated birthday wishes to the brilliant
Note to
and multitalented glass-wrangler and Web-slinger Lunesse! The last
line of this blog registered on a subconscious level, and only just surfaced
a few minutes ago, so back I came. And saw my little error.
self: proofread, fer gawd’s sake!
Peace, Kara
July 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
You’ve got to stop all this. It is wrong for children to live vicariously through their parents.
… And I didn’t have PW stuff ALL over my wall. Stephen Fry was on there as well.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:40 am
Oops, sorry!
Actually I think it’s the other way around. Your parents try (and fail) to live vicariously through you.
July 25th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Hey, what the heck, live vicariously through each *other*, then
compare notes! Hee hee.