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Steve Woodward
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Get that bleedin' kettle on

Tape-to-tape dubbing - reggae/dub mix

Hoo, Roland just made really lovely looking gear in the 70s. This is my Space Echo, same sort as Lee "Scratch" Perry used to use, and I've been getting all over-excited about how great it sounds, particularly when driven into dubby feedback.

Speaking of dub, here's a mix for your listening delight. "Pick a dub" by Keith Hudson was my first encounter with the spacey sound of dub, through John Peel playing tracks from the early-Nineties re-issue on Blood and Fire. Typically I misheard the laconic Liverpudlian and confused the assistants in Selectadisc (RIP) in Coventry  by asking for Keith Hudson's "Pick a dog". 

I heard nothing much until Scientist's genius "Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires" made up the K-JAH radio station on GTA3, which re-ignited my love for it and I've been trying to pick up bits ever since.

Here's the mix anyway, on 8tracks - Tape-to-tape dubbing. 

1. Underground - The Upsetters
2. Jacqueline - Hugh Mundell
3. Please Don't Go - Horace Andy
4. Ice Cream Love - Johnny Osbourne
5. De Materialize - Scientist
6. Black Heart - Keith Hudson
7. Red Hot - The Upsetters
8. Chapter 3 - Joe Gibbs and the Professionals
9. Spying Glass - Horace Andy
10. Bam Bam - Sister Nancy
11. Turn The Heater On - Keith Hudson
12. She's Lost Control (dub) - Grace Jones
13. Up Town Top Ranking - Althea and Donna

Filed under  //   8tracks   dub   mix   music   reggae  
Posted March 23, 2009
// 1 Comment

Depeche Mode - "Wrong"


 
Should've been through Basildon. Track rather marvellous, got to say.

Filed under  //   depechemode   music   video   youtube  
Posted March 23, 2009
// 0 Comments

Disco-throb of 80s BBC "Tomorrow's World" theme


Came across Loud-E's version of "Tomorrow's World", and found the original on YouTube - what a belter.

Posted March 7, 2009
// 0 Comments

thru-you - off-the-scale YouTube cut-up brilliance


Watch the about first so you get the idea, then it loops round and... you'll be sold, I guarantee. Really, really good funk and dub business.

Posted March 4, 2009
// 0 Comments

Aeroplane

Can't stop listening to Aeroplane right now - here's three of the best...
 

Remix of Sebastien Tellier's "Kilometer".
 

Aeroplane's "Whispers", with Kathy Diamond.
 

Remixing Grace Jones' "Williams Blood".

Filed under  //   aeroplane   disco   music   youtube  
Posted February 21, 2009
// 0 Comments

Rozalin Woods - "Whatcha' gonna do about it"

Soaring strings lift this into Big Disco heaven - go check it out over at American Athlete.

Filed under  //   disco   mp3   music  
Posted February 20, 2009
// 0 Comments

Kanye West "Welcome to the Heartbreak" and Aphex quote

(via Kottke - Datamoshing)

I was wondering a while back when jpeg artifacts would be used as an effect. Reminds me of this:

I remember reading in Music Technology about DAT machines... and it said turning the recording level up too high gives you a digital distortion which is horrible and unusable. And I thought, that's a terrible thing to say, like you can't use the medium in that way... I took it as a challenge, to use that horrible and unusable effect in some way

(from an interview with Aphex Twin, Music Technology magazine, July 1993)

Posted February 18, 2009
// 0 Comments

Moving from query string URLs in ZenCart to friendly URLs in a new ecommerce system

Dammit, I'll never make a subeditor with headlines like that.

I'll write up my experience of hand-rolling an ecommerce system using CodeIgniter shortly, as long as baby Samuel takes it a bit easier on the feeding, crying and committing heinous acts in his nappy, but in the meantime I'll share this idea for dealing with some old query-string based URLs when going to a friendly URL based system.

The version of ZenCart we were using on the old website had URLs which looked like this:

/catalogue/index.php?main_page=privacy_policy

and the new site looks more like this:

/catalogue/privacy-policy

Not necessarily a problem, but Google still had the old pages indexed, and were appearing in a search for the site. As default, CodeIgniter burps and spits out requests for URLs with query strings, so I had to make a bit of fiddly change to fix the broken search results.  This post on dranger.com ("How to make mod_rewrite strip a query string") contained the mod_rewrite magic required - cheers dranger, buy yourself a pint.

My implementation of dranger's idea is to have a rule for the couple of pages like "about us" and "privacy policy" that had direct equivalents on the new site - they each got their own redirect:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^main_page=contact_us$
RewriteRule . catalogue/contact-us$1? [R=301,L]

...and for the rest of the general product pages, they get referred back to the homepage - better than nothing:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^main_page=(.*)$
RewriteRule . catalogue$1? [R=301,L]

It might take a couple of weeks for Google to reindex these properly, but in the meantime, at least the user won't get an error on the site.  

I still really need to deal with the point-blank unfriendly "The URI you submitted has disallowed characters." error that CodeIgniter spits out, but that's one for another day.

Update: CodeIgniter 1.7.1 (released 10th Feb) now sends a 400 bad request and a slightly less brutal looking error page upon receiving a query string.

Filed under  //   apache   codeigniter   google   mod_rewrite   zencart  
Posted February 10, 2009
// 1 Comment

Warm, cold disco


Here is Warm, cold disco - another 8tracks mix I did a couple of weeks back, including Aeroplane, Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, Principles of Geometry, Tony Carey, Invisible Conga People, that really fucking ace Brassica thing, Prosumer and Murat Tepeli, Soft Rocks and the Rubberroom re-edit of the Eurythmics "Take me to your heart".  Respect to Intergalactic FM, Speculator's Short Bus Radio, Tim Sweeney's Beats In Space, and 20jazzfunkgreats.

Filed under  //   8tracks   disco   mix   music  
Posted February 7, 2009
// 0 Comments

Hello Samuel

...remains unconvinced about his father's facial hair.
 
Not much in the way of posts recently, 'cos Samuel popped out the other day, all 8lb 10oz of him. Aw.

Posted February 7, 2009
// 0 Comments