I am gonna write this right now, I am absolutely shattered but at the same time wide awake and excited. It was a success, people really enjoyed and I enjoyed it too. The museum was full after a sold out performance at the Mansion. The Elliott 803 was working and playing music!!! The ICL was spinning and the IRIS was on too, and there were volunteers everywhere talking and demoing the machines, so the visitors had the full audio/visual experience of it all.

It was great as I got to see alot of friends I hadn’t seen in a while and Imogen Heap made an appearance and we got to have quite a good chat about music, machines and things to come too.

There will undoubtedly be load of pictures from the event apearing on Flickr soon and I will link to them as well.

Thanks to all of the volunteers and staff of both The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park, it was a wonderful evening.

What can I say apart from it went, exactly as intended.  Pretty much a full house and everyone seemed to enjoy it. The room was pitch black apart from the visuals and I could make out faces every now and then, that were transfixed to the screen.

I had been up since 6.30am as I was so excited, so by about 10pm I was absolutely exhausted. I did Q&A afterwards and a tour of the museum.

I was interviewed by Dan Damon of BBC World Service, Future Music, Goldsmiths Radio, ZDNet.co.uk and several more did loads of photoshoots.  At the end I was happy it went well and I was happy to get back to the hotel, eat cookies and sleep. But I left the laptop on and got loads of nice emails and twitters, which I woke up to peek at every now and then.

More of the same tonight but with a full house, pictures will be about on the net soon, as we have a Flickr group arriving, and loads more press.

Just hanging out at The National Museum of Computing now and Just got to meet Peter Onion creator of the Elliott 803 emulator, a fantastic man who is very knowledgable about the 803. Also bumped into Dr Sue Black at lunch who has been helping raising awareness of TNMOC and Bletchley Park.

This message was transmitted from Bletchley Park.

Dazed & Confused Magazine

Check it out!, very pleased with this interview some interesting and challenging questions and even more interesting and challenging anwers. A little bit freaked out about being in both Dazed & Confused and New Scientist in the same week, not sure what that means, or if it means anything.

It was good fun to do though.

Out Now!!! This is what it looks like, commit it to memory.

Dazed & Confused Magazine cover reproduced with permission.

Also I have just been listed as guest of the month by the PRS Foundation you can read more here.

Did my interview with BBC 6 Music’s Tom Robinson :) but sadly I didn’t make it to the BBC, will definitely have to make sure I meet him in person soon and say, thank you, he has been a huge supporter of not just me and my music but but new music in general. The interview goes out on his show Monday @ 01:00 – 03:00 and you can find out more info here. You can listen again as well after the show from the BBC Website here t’s about 30 minutes through.

Also on March 16th be sure to check out BBC Radio 4 @ 16:30-17:00 I did an interview with the very excellent Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet.co.uk a for show called “Click On” it’s all about “Obsolete?” and The National Museum of Computing for more info visit their website here.

Also this just in!!! check out www.newscientist.com I am on the front page :)

Very excited tickets for the Saturday March 21st performance have sold out and Friday looks set to as well,  I have been in the studio making last minute tweaks and edits whilst receiving updates and it’s really great news.

I have to head off to London tomorrow to BBC 6 Music to be interviewed by Tom Robinson of BBC 6 Music who has been supportive of my music and played a few of my tracks over the last year, so it will nice to meet him in person. Eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new March 14th issue of New Scientist Magazine as well as the new Dazed & Confused, it’s all been great these last couple of weeks and met some really interesting people.

Be sure to check out BBC Radio 4 on the March 16th here I did an interview with the very excellent Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet.co.uk a for show called “Click On” it’s all about “Obsolete?” and The National Museum of Computing.

Well thats it for today!

Don’t panic, I know it’s all gone a bit quiet on the production front thats just cause I am so busy tweaking and doing the visuals. Very pleased, word is getting out about the performances and it looks like quite a few people are talking about it.

“More Math” has been extended and I have decided my current favorite machine at the moment is this the Brunsviga adding machine which is capable of a vast array of clicks and whizzes and is the main instrument in “More Math“.

So tomorrow I will be back at it, working on the visuals and tweaking the music here and there. I won’t be giving too much away in any of the blogs before the performance either you’ll just have to come along and see and hear it.

Decided to enlarge “Function” switch it up and introduce new ideas, which I am pleased with, will probably do more on it and “More Math” tomorrow if I have time.

Started “Monster” based around the PDP11 and the IRIS (Investigative Radar Recording System) also known as the Green Eyed Monster due to it’s scale and the two circular green screens. It’s to my left in the workshop always humming away and as I pass it back and forth in and out of the workshop, I get a very strong woooshing sound from the fans on the PDP11 so I decided to record several passes of it. Recording it this way gives it a really nice Doppler effect and panning, kind of reminds me of Ben Burts lightsabres in Star Wars. The piece also includes sounds of fans from the PDP8 and the power transformer humm from the Elliott 803.

Completely finished “20032009200″ which is great as it gave me a good outline for “21032009200″ and did a lot of thinking about the project in general. The more I get deeper into the piece I see that it is becoming more logical, more mathematical, almost like a computer program, not it’s structure but it’s themes it’s use of those ideas. The piece is about the museum and in preparation for it I looked into the history of the machines, the history of the building, the people, encoding, etc if I had just written it in without looking into it, it wouldn’t have the depth it now has, it is a study of The National Museum of Computing.

“Function” for instance does work like a function call in a program it appears later in the music, but it goes back to “Late at the office” (which also take rhythms from “Obsolete?” the final piece) and returns with additional rhythms. It also goes back to “Math” and does the same. Yes, I am aware composers have been sewing themes throughout pieces forever, but it’s new to me especially a piece in 3/4 briefly overlayed with harsh rhythms in 4/4 definetely stands out and it’s nice. I think I will draw a diagram.

“Math” has a very specific rhythm and I hadn’t been able to get it out of my head, it uses a –   – - -   – rhythm. In morse code it would approximately be E S E, that doesn’t stand for anything it’s just a rhythm that was in my head. Anyway, to me it sound like a typewriter slowly tapping out a message, which in turn made me think about the Colossus Typewriter, and then about the encryption or masking that the Lorenz used. If A is the plain text and C is the obscuring character then F is the cipher-text (you can find out more about this here at Tony Sale’s website). So I overlayed the rhythm with itself thus creating a different rhythm, again this is a practice used for ages by composers it just makes me think about it different when dealing with this subject matter as the rhythm could then be turned back into morse code with a different outcome. This doubled-up rhythm is then doubled again and makes an appearance in “20032009200″.

But thats all I am gonna give you, you’ll have to come and listen. Closely.

After getting all the samples, today was mainly spent chopping them up. I am slowly putting together “200320092000″ and “210320092000″ as I have taken the rhythms from the adding machines and reproduced them in various forms both song are completely different so both performances will be too. I have completely finished “BEEP” and the video for it, and it has amused everyone that has seen it, which is a good sign. Finished “Late at the office” if Sly & The Family Stone made music with these machines I think this is how it would sound.

It seems that “Obsolete?” is gonna be 90% rhythm which is quite nice, and has about 100+ different rhythms in it, instead of the five main pieces I had in my head there are about twelve shorter pieces. I am slowly putting them in order and piecing together the video as well, which is the difficult bit. Making a thirty minute music video in two months is quite a difficult task, I must remember that in the future.

So back in the studio tomorrow too.

Ok Friday the 13th over without a hitch, I arose early today at 5.30am to set off for TNMOC on my usual four hour journey to get there, it was a good day. I had specific tasks to do, like re record the Brunsviga and Bulmers adding machines, but with specific numbers in them, one was 20/03/2009/2000 which will of course be 20th March 2009 at 8pm which will be half way through the first performance of “Obsolete?”. By putting the number in and turning the handle it creates a rhythm, and that rhythm will be used for basis of part of the composition, which in turn will make the 21/03/2009/2000 which will of course be 21st March 2009 at 8pm performance slightly different to the one on the 20th.

The second bit of encoding was to encode the word “BEEP” into morse code, which lead to several conversations of “What does it mean”, “Beep”, “No Matthew what does it mean”, “Beep”. Then after encoding “BEEP” it creates a morse code rhythm a rhythm of beeps. Which I find a amusing the idea of creating a piece of music out of beeps.

The day was interrupted but in a nice way as I was featured on BBC News 24, E24 which can be viewed here for the next 7 days via BBC iPlayer. It was great I really like the Elliott 803 (Please note I have now spelt it correctly this time) and it was wonderful to see it on TV.

Back to work me and a few of the other volunteers started turning on random machines, I would get a call along the lines of “come have a listen to this” and I would come and record the sound and film it. Things like M22 Paper tape punch and a line printer that screeched really loud, all good.

And then it happened, I wandered past Colossus and it was different, the sound was different, Colossus when running properly has a set rhythm and a set sound, but today it was running a different algorithm not only that but some of the panels for the relays were off, so you could see inside even more and it altered the sound as well. After a few questions I set up recorded and filmed and was very happy with the new sounds from Colossus.

I did a bit on the BBC Micro mainly recorded longer versions of the sounds I already had not much needed doing on that.

The Elliot 803 was out of comission today for repairs which gave a chance to chat to the volunteers about it’s inner workings, and found out about it’s ability to created “logic waves” they said they wouldn’t be powerfull enough to power a speaker without amplification, but it might make the Elliott 803 sound different. We also got to turn on the tape reader, the Elliott 803 uses a very unique system. From what I understand it uses 35mm film covered in maganetic stuff? So we turned that on and filmed and recorded that too.

So loads of new sounds and loads to get on with tomorrow and Tuesday in the studio.