Tags: concept

24

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Friday, March 7th, 2025

Prog

I really like Brad’s new project, Cold Album Drumming:

Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?

I got a kick out of watching him play along to Radiohead’s In Rainbows and The Decemberist’s The Crane Wife.

I was really into The Decemberists in the first decade of the 21st Century. I remember seeing them in a long-gone Brighton venue more than twenty years ago.

But I kind of stopped paying attention to them after they released The Hazards Of Love. Not because I didn’t like that album. Quite the opposite. I love that album. I think in my mind I kind of thought “That’s it, they’ve done it, they can go home now.”

It’s exactly the kind of album I should not like. It’s a concept album. A folk-rock opera.

When I was growing up, concept albums were the antithesis of cool. Prog rock was like an insult.

You have to remember just how tribal music was back in the ’70s and ’80s. In my school, I remember the divide between the kind of people who listened to The Cure and The Smiths versus the kind of people who listened to Prince or Queen. Before that you had the the mods and the rockers, which in hindsight makes no sense—how are The Who and The Jam not rockers?

Looking back now, it’s ridiculous. I get the impression that for most people growing up in the last few decades, those kind of distinctions have been erased. People’s musical intake is smeared across all types and time periods. That is a good thing.

Anyway, a folky prog-rock opera like The Hazards Of Love is exactly the kind of thing that past me would’ve hated. Present me adores it. Maybe it’s because it’s got that folky angle. I suspect Colin Meloy listened to a lot of Horslips—heck, The Decemberists even did their own mini version of The Táin.

Speaking of mythic Irish language epics, I really like John Spillane’s Fíorusice:

Fíoruisce - The Legend of the Lough is a three-act Gaelic folk opera composed by Irish artist John Spillane. It is a macaronic or bilingual work. The work is an imagined re-Gaelicization of the Victorian Cork fairytale Fior-usga collected by Thomas Crofton Croker in the 1800’s and published in his book Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1828). The story is a surreal tale culminating in a drowned kingdom, which as lore tells us, becomes The Lough in Cork city as we know it today. They say, you can see the tops of the underworld towers on a clear day and hear the music of their big party on Midsummer’s night.

Yup, it’s another concept album. And funnily enough, past me was not a fan of John Spillane either.

I first heard him when he was part of a trad band called Nomos in Cork in the early ’90s (the bódhran player’s mother was friends with my mother). I really liked their tunes but I thought the songs were kind of twee.

Over the years, the more of his songs I heard, the more I understood that John Spillane was just being completely open and honest. Past me thought that was twee. Present me really respects it. In fact, I genuinely love his songs like Johnny Don’t Go To Ballincollig and All The Ways You Wander.

And then there’s Passage West. It’s a masterpiece. I might be biased because Passage West is the next town over from Cobh, where I grew up.

So yeah, Fíorusice is something that past me would’ve disdained:

  1. a concept album by
  2. John Spillane in
  3. the Irish language.

Present me is into all three.

It’s Bandcamp Friday today. I think I know what I’m going to get.

Saturday, October 29th, 2022

Misconceptions

Some common geographic mental misplacements.

Sunday, January 2nd, 2022

Metaphors We Web By: Paper and Place

Out of all of these metaphors, the two most enduring are paper and physical space.

Friday, June 4th, 2021

Beginner JavaScript Notes - Wes Bos

A very handy collection of organised notes on all things JavaScript.

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020

How big tech hijacked its sharpest, funniest critics - MIT Technology Review

How design fiction was co-opted. A piece by Tim Maughan with soundbites from Julian Bleecker, Anab Jain, and Scott Smith.

Saturday, February 15th, 2020

The Map of Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!

Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.

Friday, December 13th, 2019

Self Treat

It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:

Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.

You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Complexity Explorables

A cornucopia of interactive visualisations. You control the horizontal. You control the vertical. Networks, flocking, emergence, diffusion …it’s all here.

Monday, October 22nd, 2018

33 Concepts Every JavaScript Developer Should Know

Please ignore the hyperbolic linkbaity title designed to stress you out and make you feel inadequate. This is a handy listing of links to lots of JavaScript resources, grouped by topic …some of which you could know.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2018

Refresh – A fresh approach to the browser

Some interesting ideas for evolving the web browser. I’m very interested in the ideas about navigating our browser history—that feels like a very underappreciated goldmine with a direct lineage to the “associative trails” imagined for the memex.

Monday, July 9th, 2018

Solving Sol

Browser implementations of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual and minimal art, many of which only exist as instructions like this:

Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

obstructions / choose your obstructions

Hit this URL to give yourself a design constraint (or obstruction). Kind of like Brian Eno’s oblique strategies but with different categories of constraints: formal, methodological, and conceptual.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2017

Tuesday, August 30th, 2016

The Improbable, Bold History of Space Concept Art – How We Get To Next

A brief history of space concept art—Norman Rockwell, Chesney Bonestell, Robert McCall, Pat Rawlings, David Meltzer …all the classics.

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014

The New Yandex.Browser. Alpha version

A concept browser from Yandex that takes an interesting approach to URLs: on the one hand, hiding them …but then putting them front and centre.

But the main focus of this concept browser is to blur the line between browser chrome and the website it’s displaying.

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

Come at me!

A wonderful collection of misconceptions, often the result of being myzelled when young.

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

WORLDMOON

A masterplan for the moon as a global cemetery. Launch the ashes of your loved ones to the moon (leaving the buckyball container in lunarstationary orbit). Given enough ashes and enough buckyballs, the result is a fertile surface and a atmosphere-trapping layer of fullerine. Terraforming via recycled humans.

Or, if that’s too long-term for you, you can buy a scale-model moon jewel.

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Shimizu’s Dream - Shimizu Corporation

Among the proposed projects from the Shimizu corporation are a space hotel, giant lakes in the desert, and a ring around the moon to harness solar energy.

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Future Drama

Past predictions of the future in concept videos.