Mélange: Perth Visit, Psychology and Electronic Music

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In a few minutes I will be boarding a plane to visit my old hometown of Perth, Western Australia. It's a short visit and the primary reason will be to attend the national conference of the Australia-China Friendship Society for reasons of the Avatar Mountain environmental business, with the intention to visit concrete manufacturers as well. Nevertheless, whilst I am there I will take the opportunity to catch up with friends and have arranged a dinner on Sunday the 12th at Bistro Bellavista. There are a couple of individuals whom I'm quite keen on seeing as we haven't been in each other's physical company for more than twenty-five years and of course many others who I make every effort to see each time I journey to The Western Lands.

The journey comes on the back of finishing the final pieces of assessment for the first unit of the Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology; after presentations, essays, and interviews this was a short but surprisingly difficult exam that dealt with the finer points of quantitative research methods. It seemed appropriate that after such an exam I attended the Melbourne Recital Centre for a presentation entitled "Sampled Reality", student material with atypical instrumentation (voices, household objects) was digitally transformed and introduced with a personal psychological statement. It is hardly a new approach and it was by necessary experimental, but I was quietly impressed by one that included a fair component of a rhythmic narrative. Afterward, we dined and drank at Milk The Cow, a worthy licensed fromagerie.

Following the topic of electronic music, I wrote a fairly lengthy piece on the death of Vangelis this week for Rocknerd, which follows a prior piece on Klaus Schulze, and must be followed on recognition of the recent death of Dave Smith, the lead developer for the MIDI protocols. It is yet another example of the engineer's curse; there would have been no Vangelis or Schulze, or for that matter pretty much any musician from 1980 onwards if it were not for the work of Dave Smith. But is by consumption of music that most live, rather than its production, and production protocols are a step even further removed even if they are a necessity to the final contemporary product.

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

Thank you for that article. I didn't even realize Vangelis had died. He was such a brilliant composer.

EDIT: Also:

“Chariots of Fire” is actually a twenty-minute epic ranging from gentle waves to crashing crescendos. As an entirely subjective representation and an indication of my reading habits of the time, as a teenager I would often fall asleep to this, dreaming of Tolkien’s Noldor Elves crossing from the Undying Lands to Middle Earth.

YES, I've also heard that song playing in my head when thinking about the Flight of the Noldor.

[motg]

Did I ever know you and I shared the same birthplace?

Verily, it is the land that time forgot. But there are good things about the mystic country....