I’ve reached a critical point in my quest for new-ness. For some time I haven’t bought much music, new or old, relying instead on the constantly rotating shopfront of sites like Elbows and Hype. Sure, there is the occasional trip to a record store or two, and the necessary purchases made. But I strive for something new. Not new as in recently released, but new as in something to stir an untouched part inside.
So I’ve come up with a solution. Not a perfect one by any means, but something to spur on purchases of artists and albums that I would never pick up in a shop. So, once a week I will purchase about three albums from Amazon, aiming at around twenty quid for the bunch.
Using a random number generator and Amazon’s recommendation system (honed over about half an hour of clicking ‘I love this’ and ‘I’m not interested’) I’ll hopefully discover some new artists, and some stuff by folks I love that I’ve never got around to buying. And then I’ll go and bore you all by sharing the results…
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Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008)
One of science fiction’s brightest luminaries rotates slowly towards the light at the end of the tunnel today, Arthur C Clarke passing away in his home in Sri Lanka this morning. Obviously most famous for his novel The Sentinel, transformed for film into the lauded 2001: A Space Odyssey. Upon reading about Clarke this morning, I discovered many tangents between his life and mine. Clarke was born on December 16, as was I. He studied at King’s College London, as did I. He was chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, whose office is across the road from mine, and whose bin padge adorns my monitor. Small coincidences that spurred me to write this post, and accompany it with some songs about space. I guess there is something about the cosmos that inspires art of all forms. As a concept it is pure fiction and fantasy: an infinite blank canvas for creatives to work their magic. Clarke leaves this world with stories of higher intelligence, futures yet to be realised, robots ruling humans. A true literary giant passes. R.I.P.
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