Photo: Rachael Marshall

Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon can be incredibly disorientating and disconcerting. So it was with some luck that I happened to stumble into the MK Gallery – or more precisely, the neighbouring Project Space – and the new Station X exhibition.

I’m interested in the history of Bletchley Park – also known as Station X – and the blurb on the door piqued my interest.

Inside I found a collaboration between four artists, each from a different background, which aims to document the ‘visual and aural histories’ of  some of the Park’s derelict  buildings.

I went from the usual Saturday afternoon hubbub – of people coming and going from the theatre and shopping centre, and of the blustery April weather – into a small but self-contained area which instantly began stimulating my senses.

On the walls of the gallery are photographs taken inside the derelict huts by Rachael Marshall – oh, but what’s this? That one isn’t a photograph, it seems to be a physical bit of wall itself.  Maya Ramsay‘s work includes actual pieces of the walls and associated debris, carefully lifted off in one piece and pasted to the wall of the gallery.

All around me I could hear the work of sound artist Caroline Devine – cacophonous sounds of… birds, were they? And then they morphed into reverberating rhythms which I couldn’t quite place. At times they rose to a climax that I found almost disconcerting, before subsiding again to an ambient throb and thrum.

I watched a video piece at this point too, nicely displayed on an old CRT television, and where the video itself has been left to decay a little, as though watching on an old VHS tape or a badly-tuned station. But the picture was occasionally clear enough to see that we were being shown around more of the derelict buildings – a guided tour of urban exploration.

Together with Luke Williams, the four artists have combined to make a small but neatly formed whole which does very well to remove you from the busy urban bustle of Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon, placing you firmly inside the dimly lit and derelict buildings of Station X before they are due to be renovated.

The combination of the, at once familiar, yet other worldly, sounds and atmospheric photographs of dust, cobwebs and the odd decaying bird, along with the physical ‘casts’ of the walls themselves all give a very peculiar overall feeling.

I visited Bletchley Park recently, and was awed as much by the beauty of the main buildings as by the technological ingenuity contained within when it was needed most.

But while a visit to the Park itself reveals objects and buildings being restored and brought out on display – as they should be – the Station X exhibition at MK Gallery does a good job of capturing the areas not seen by the public, and the associated sounds and sights which have been left to decay and evolve alone.

With my interests in history and in archiving and preserving lost objects and environments – and particularly in field recordings and photography – I was very grateful to have stumbled on the exhibition.

Station X is on at MK Gallery Project Space (to the right of the theatre entrance courtyard) until 27 May. Entry is free. The Gallery is open every day except Monday.

http://www.mkgallery.org/information/

http://www.mkgallery.org/education/projectspace/station_x/

http://documentingstationx.wordpress.com/

I’ve recently been playing with the National Library of New Zealand‘s excellent Papers Past archive, along with the Digital NZ website. The former is a resource I’ve long been a fan of – even to the point of printing off whole editions of newspapers held in the archive – while the latter is one I’ve known about for a while but never really used.

It turns out that the big search box that greets you on the Digital NZ homepage is basically a Google for digital New Zealand content. Excellent! Not only can you search just one resource at a time, but a whole host of them, refining the search with filters to drill down to find just what you want.

I can’t believe I hadn’t used it before, but it looks like Digital NZ and the NLNZ’s new beta website are both related and are currently under development. They both work great, sure – but they also look beautiful.

It’s not often that you can say that about a library’s public access catalogue!

One of the benefits of an overhauled new system is a system of APIs which allows developers to make cool stuff using the rich sources of data held by the library. One such project is Tim Sherratt’s QueryPicNZ – a simple tool which performs some pretty complex calculations.

It’ll show you on a graph the number of times a particular search term is used in the whole of the Papers Past archive. It’s great for visually analysing the occurrences of a particular event, say, or for easily identifying the unique uses of a particular phrase.

What’s more, the results plotted on the graph are all clickable, and take you directly to the article in question. Seamless.

Anyway, I stumbled on a 130-year-old article in Papers Past after playing with QueryPicNZ.

I’ve had Christchurch on my mind a lot recently. I can’t really work out why; I’ve spent some time there, but not a great deal. I don’t have family there. But the place resonates within me, and the recent upheaval the city is going through has been a source of constant fascination to me. I’m sure I’ll try and distill this peculiar feeling another time, but for now let’s get back to the matter at hand.

The article in The Star newspaper described a panoramic photograph of Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, taken from the recently-constructed (and now destroyed) Christ Church Cathedral, giving a view of the city in 1881. The article compares the photograph to a particular watercolour which was “a faithful presentment of the Christchurch of 1852.”

The article goes on: “When the tower of the Cathedral had been completed, some of the citizens took advantage of the opportunity to look down, upon the City of the Plains…Beyond the Belts they could see thriving and populous suburbs, and, in every direction, indications that the growth of the community is proceeding with undiminished rigour.”

It describes how Messrs Wheeler and Co. captured “as perfect a panorama as could reasonably be desired.” The panorama affords “much surprise of an agreeable nature, inasmuch as they are not the mere ‘pictures of roofs and chimneys’ which might perhaps have been anticipated.”

The article closes, praising the panorama as “a most effective and highly creditable example of the status in this Colony of one of the artistic pursuits.”

Praise indeed. But what about that photograph? It sounded great, and I really wanted to see it.

Knowing that I had NLNZ’s excellent tools at my disposal, I performed a few searches, but turned up nothing. (Actually that’s not quite true; I turned up about ten other items of interest which lost me about an hour in researching those in turn!)

Eventually, however, I found a lithograph from 1889 which made reference to the Wheeler photograph. It turned out that it was actually based on the panorama itself, and coloured in. So although I couldn’t find the original Wheeler image, here was a tracing of that image, with added colour!

And the icing on the cake, that comes with so many National Library of New Zealand searches: the image has been scanned and is available to view online instantly. So here it is:

Potts, William, 1859-1947Edmund Wheeler and Son (Firm). Willis, Archibald Dudingston (Firm) :City of Christchurch, N. Z. W. Potts, lith, E. Wheeler & Son, Photo. A. D. Willis lithographer, Wanganui. [1889]. Wakefield, Edward 1845-1924 :New Zealand illustrated. The story of New Zealand and descriptions of its cities and towns by Edward Wakefield; also (by various writers) the natural wonders of New Zealand (past and present). Wanganui. A. D. Willis, 1889.. Ref: PUBL-0019-09. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23041986

It’s a stunning image, I’m sure you’ll agree. The newspaper article wasn’t exaggerating.

But the great news doesn’t end there.

NLNZ haven’t just scanned the above image; no, just like a whole load more images you can find in their archive, they’ve scanned it at eye-searingly high resolution, which you can view and zoom into just by clicking the catalogue link, then clicking ‘See original record’, then ‘View archived copy online’. It’s a slightly fiddly process, but the results are worth it.

Here’s a snippet of the image at full resolution:

If you ever find an image on the NLNZ catalogue – particularly a photograph from that era – and there’s a link to view it online, do so. The resolution of the scan will be huge, and the quality of those large-format images of the time is insane. I’ve lost hours panning around a street scene from the turn of the century, reading all the shop signs and scrutinising the faces of whoever happened to be in front of the lens the day the photograph was taken.

Related: Check out a recent NLNZ blog post about just this subject: embiggening images.

I love The Tube.

blast! Films has put together a really fun, interesting series looking at the life both in front of and behind the scenes of London’s Underground railway. I’m coming at it as someone who’s rather fond of the Tube, and I can see that it might not appeal to everyone. But for the most part, like any good documentary, it’s just a story about people.

Episodes have focussed on ticket inspectors, drivers, station staff, track engineers and head office  and many more. It’s slickly edited to give a broad view of the system over the course of a day, night or weekend, with lots of interwoven ‘stories.’

You can catch The Tube on BBC iPlayer. All episodes to date are still online. Episode one is here.

As a series of vignettes, I can’t help but find that it reminds me of HV Morton‘s series of essays, brought together in little volumes with titles like Nights of London, The Spell of London, or The Heart of London.

Although Morton’s London was studied and written about in the 1920s, the London Underground features regularly in his writing – as it will in most London stories from the 20th century onwards.

Morton’s writing is detailed and vivid – but not without humour. His observations are often as amusing as they are serious. One of my favourite things is that he writes about scenarios and people that you can still find in London today – just as much as he writes about ways of life that have all but vanished.

I love Morton’s books on London – it’s a joy to flip through slices of life from all over the city, all walks of life, from almost a hundred years ago. He also wrote books about travels in England and beyond.

You can read his 1936 book The Call of England online, and the chapter on Manchester is great. It opens with: “I came into Manchester over a road as hard as the heart of a rich relation,” and goes on to say: “I have been told that it always rains in Manchester. This is a lie; it had just stopped.”

Read the chapter (and the whole book) online, thanks to archive.org. (Tip: if you click the ‘i’ button, top right of the ebook reader, you can download the entire book in other formats.)

“Kill it with fire? Nah, nuke it from orbit.”

Such graphic, violent language always makes me smile – it tickles the same part of my monkey brain that delights in seeing people slip over on hard, wet surfaces on You’ve Been Framed!, for example.

It was used the other day by The Mancunian columnist Lloyd Henning as he dissected the irritating recent explosion in ‘university memes’. Quite rightly, Henning said the same, unfunny jokes were being repeated over and over,

…until the meme is not only beating a humourless dead horse – it’s nuking it from orbit.

Indeed. I also came across the phrase in another blog article the other day which, alas, escapes me.

On a related note, Gizmodo UK also recently featured something I think I’d heard of before – the BBC’s script, which was to be used in the 1970s if the worst happened, and the UK was nuked.

“This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,” the recording would begin. “This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.”

Chilling. For some cozy bedtime reading, the full BBC PDF can be found here.

And as if those sort of vague, distant threats weren’t frightening enough, I was dozily browsing the BBC News site earlier this week, when I found a story which opened with this little doozy:

“The government must take more seriously the threat of a nuclear weapon being exploded in space by a rogue state”

Jesus. Alright, then.

The chairman of the Defence Select Committee calmly stated that such an attack was “quite likely.” Strewth.

If all this talk of, like, actually nuking it from orbit is getting a bit much for you, then you might, like me, enjoy this gallery of high-res images of nuclear tests from the 1960s and 1970s, collated and displayed in Alan Taylor’s wonderful In Focus feature on The Atlantic.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense

Eerily beautiful. Sleep tight.

As we pedalled harder, the natural curve of the cycle path took us, mercifully, away from the noise of the busy A5. That’s when I saw a sign reading ‘bird hide’.

The paradoxical nature of the area we were in kept surprising me. On the one hand, we were riding along a perfectly paved cycle route, part of a car-free network from the centre of modern Milton Keynes out, to the more ancient countryside and villages. Never far away, either, are the busy arterial roads that dissect the area, connecting up with ever-larger roads leading away in all directions.

But on the other hand, we were always surrounded by green vegetation, muddy footpaths, rivers, canals and nature. Any time we stopped for more than a few seconds, the overwhelming sensation was the sound of birdlife.

Darting through the woodland as it grew denser, I caught sight of the previously signposted bird hide. To our delight, we had found a very sturdy wooden construction, painted black, consisting of steps leading up to a box sheltered on three sides – save for a slit in the front. Inside the box were a bench and small shelf – the perfect place to sit and have our sandwiches.

As we draped our picnic blanket over the bench and unpacked our lunch, we cast our eyes through the narrow slot towards the wetlands that our vantage point overlooked. There, in the first lake in front of us, stood proudly, was a heron, calmly watching the waters and skies around it.

As we tucked into our lunch, hungry by now, we also caught sight of a host of smaller birds coming to feed on peanuts and other treats situated just to the right of the hide. We saw blue tits, great tits, sparrows and a couple of finches, all of which took me back to watching birds in my childhood back garden.

We took a moment to appreciate how lucky we were to happen upon the hide at the time we did, it being the perfect way to get out of the rather bracing breeze, and providing a place to sit and eat our lunch, whilst admiring one of the finest views we had encountered on the ride so far.

Shortly after, we folded up our picnic blanket, attaching it once more to the rack on the back of the Pashley, and we mounted our bikes again, before heading off to see what surprises lay around the next corner.

I was tickled, earlier this week, to read an interesting article on the New York Times website about the supposed death of the “cyberflâneur”. Actually, I was mostly thrilled to be reading an article about the subject of the cyberflâneur in general.

It concerns the idea – in parallel with the flâneur of old – of the web surfer jumping from site to site, checking out this and that, just for the sake of curiosity. It’s not a concept alien to most web users, even if the term itself is used less frequently.

Many’s the time I’ve found myself wasting hours, having had my interest piqued by something as innocent as a photograph or a paragraph of text. I’ll end up reading all about the subject on Wikipedia (almost always my starting point), before looking for related images, maps or related media.

Often, I’ll even find myself consulting primary resources such as newspaper archives or ebooks as a result of a particularly interest concept.

Very occasionally, such an information expedition can lead to a life-long obsession.

So, as much as I enjoyed the well-written NY Times article mentioned above, I was somewhat baffled at the assertion that the cyberflâneur, that curiosity-fuelled web-surfer I declare myself to be, are “few and far between.”

Really? Are we really a dying breed?

Anyway, the article, and the concept of flânerie in general, has occupied my mind for the past few days, and I’d been meaning to write this blog post to highlight an article I found interesting, but one which I felt was deeply flawed. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that it’s not just me that’s had this notion.

Over at The Atlantic, a hastily-written but useful piece has been posted, expressing feelings similar to my own. The author argues, quite rightly, that the cyberflâneur lurks – and, indeed, thrives – on Tumblr, Flickr or Pinterest. He (or she) jumps from obscure maps to interesting images, constantly in search of some new thing to be fascinated by.

Sure, as the NY Times piece affirms, we use the web in a different way these days; jumping to particular destinations to perform particular tasks. And, as it says, the use of apps has leapfrogged browsing to websites, allowing us to do very specific things without getting caught up on the way.

But these specific and particular tasks, I’d argue, are the equivalent of the original flâneur’s banks, post offices, or similar.

Much as we may find ourselves connecting directly to the likes of Gmail or Facebook for certain needs, the flâneur would make a beeline to the bank if he deemed it necessary. And just as the flâneur would then take an idle stroll through arcades of shops selling things he could never dream of owning, so too does the cyberflâneur spend a ‘wasted’ half an hour drooling over things they wish they could afford, or places they would much rather be.

The concept of flânerie is one I find very interesting, and I would consider myself to be something of that kind. I’d say I’m probably more just a daydreamer, and a curious, nerdy one at that, but flânerie – cyber or not – is as romantic title to give it as any other.

Although Evgeny Morozov’s New York Times piece may be flawed in its eulogising of the cyberflâneur, it’s still a cracking read, and will hopefully set off a train of thought in your mind too. He’s clearly a learned man who has a way with words, and he paints a nice picture of the original flâneur.

John Hendel’s Atlantic piece is rather more slapdash – with less panache, and some rather oddball comparisons – but it’s still worth a read as a rebuttal to Morozov’s argument.

Oh, and I couldn’t resist it: reports of the death of the cyberflâneur are, indeed, greatly exaggerated…

All those little, spur of the moment, “OMG you HAVE to see this” type nuggets tend to get vomited up onto my Twitter or Facebook feeds. Longer-form stories about my life are dull and uninteresting to anyone but myself (although I haven’t ruled these out, I just haven’t been bothered to write anything like it recently). And photographs I’ve taken tend to go online via Flickr, but I’ve been doing that less and less lately too.

With that said, here are four things I’ve been loving recently. There’s a load more, too, but these are four of the best.

Thing one: Nicholas Whiting’s photography

I stumbled on this chap’s work through his submissions to Manchester Daily Photo, I think, and I idly followed the link to his blog [http://nicholas-whiting.blogspot.com/]. My eyes were greeted by a cracking assortment of images, many of them taken on film, of all sorts of subjects.

Turns out Nick, a student at University of Manchester, also submits his work to the Mancunian (formerly Student Direct) amongst others, but I think his stuff should be seen much more widely. I have featured a handful of his photographs on Manchester Daily Photo, and a few more are coming up in the pipeline. Keep your eyes peeled.

Thing two: Peter Broderick’s new album

Look, ok, it’s titled http://www.itstartshear.com (a URL as well as a title), and the first single from the album (featured in the excellent video blow) helpfully implants said URL into your head via the magic of melody.

But controversial/gimmicky title aside, it’s worth stating here for clarity: this is a new solo vocal album from Peter Broderick: it’s going to be a joy. Click play in the video box below and have a listen to the first single (It Starts Hear), set to a series of images and movies collected by Broderick over recent years.

Peter Broderick – It Starts Hear from Bella Union on Vimeo.

The title, incidentally, refers to an actual website, which will launch next month, around the time the album is released. Its purpose, according to Broderick, is to “be a place where all listeners, no matter what format they obtain the music in, can easily access all the lyrics and notes and visuals which are meant go along with the songs.”

His point, obviously, is that whether you download the song illegally, buy the LP, or hear it taped off the radio (right?), every listener should have access to the same extra fluff – the metadata, the artwork – in the same way (albeit digitally). I like this a lot – Broderick feels the same way as I do about this subject, and he even goes so far as to say that illegal downloading of his music “doesn’t bother” him. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

The point is, as I say, there’s a new, proper, Peter Broderick album on the horizon (release date: February 20th, via Bella Union), and it will be accompanied by some extra (audio-?) visual fluff to enjoy and add to it. Bring. It. On.

Thing three: Responsive Web Design

On the subject of presentation via the Web, I have lately been spending a disproportionate amount of my time reading about Responsive Web Design, ostensibly for my Applied Web Design and Management unit at university, but also just because I find it fascinating. I know.

The above book, Ethan Marcotte‘s game-changing Responsive Web Design (published last year by A Book Apart – details here) is a pleasantly brief, but no less informative introduction to the whole concept. It covers all the basics, providing understandable examples, and serving as a spring-board for web designers of any level (i.e. from myself upwards) into this new web design concept.

I’ll probably write more about responsive web design, and why it thrills me so much, at another time. Meanwhile I am having a bash at coding a new responsive version of Manchester Daily Photo – a feat which is at first pointless (Tumblr’s mobile website layout is very nice, if a little generic) but then also long overdue. Watch this space.

Thing four: Henry Cooke’s photography

Henry Cooke is a young photographer from Wellington, NZ, and I can’t actually remember how I stumbled upon his Flickr account. Sorry about that. But I know that when I did, I spent about an hour paging through his photographs, rapt. It was the mixture of intimate portraits and shots of the city of Wellington and surrounding scenery that did it, along with the mixture of sharp, digital shots and nicely fuzzy film snaps.

Turns out our Henry’s a bit of a polymath on the web, with a tech column at Stuff, and various other online profiles with which to stalk the hell out of him. He’s a smart chap with a good eye, not just for photography but also for typography and design.

Bonus Thing: Lisa Abrams’ photography

For years I’ve been a huge fan of poring over film photographs taken by interesting people with an eye for style and use of light, shadows and colour. When those photographs are taken on interesting hardware, such as old Russian cameras, it makes the deal even sweeter. So can you believe my luck when my wonderful partner Lisa ticked all those boxes?

She’s so far taken about fifteen films with her rather excellent Zenit EM camera, and a lot of them have made their way to Flickr for all to see. Call me biased, but some of the resulting photographs are superb, and they just keep getting better and better.

Head over to her Flickr account to have a look at what she’s been up to.

That’s all for now. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go and shelve some books for ale money. Oh, and learn to use my new camera properly. Oh, and re-code a website from scratch. Oh, and finish my degree. Oh, and…

I made a thing. For the second of our Applied Web Design and Management coursework submissions, we were tasked with creating a small website.

It had to contain a 6-step tutorial for a task of our choosing, and had to incorporate appropriate navigation and layout, along with original images and text. It also obviously had to validate and be accessible.

Finally, the whole project had to be created as a Dreamweaver template file.

I chose to create a tutorial for new users of a Zenit E SLR camera.

From the very start I wanted to have an instruction manual feel to the pages, along with a filmstrip for navigation. The rest of the pages are more traditional layout elements.

I don’t really call myself a web designer, despite doing all of these types of things for years. But I’m pretty happy with the results.

I spent an awful lot of time on it, which I don’t regret one bit. Like other skills and creative pursuits, web design is one of those things where you can spend hours tweaking something which will never be noticed, and where, from the outside, the results can look deceptively simplistic.

All the same, I like my little project, and it’s been a rare example of a piece of university coursework I’ve loved working on. I know several improvements that could be made – most of which would require starting over completely. Such retrospect can be applied to future work.

To view the project, either click the screenshot above, or this link.

Frank and Kathleen Ross, c.1925

Tapesponding is the rather forced moniker given to the hobby of, simply, corresponding by tape. People would post tape back and forth between themselves, or possibly amongst a group of people, each recording a segment for the next listener to hear and then add to.

Tape recorder clubs incorporated tapesponding in their repertoire, but also indulged in creating field recordings, documentaries, and other such audio output. Sort of do-it-yourself radio.

I’ve recently stumbled upon the above phenomena and I’m enthralled. Regular readers will know I’ve got a bit of a thing for radio and field recordings and such like, and the discovery of all this has really captured my imagination.

For me, the most significant attractor to audio and radio is the personalisation of the medium. When you’re reading written words, they can only convey so much. But, being humans, we can get so much more from the intonations and delivery of the words we use. Beyond the spoken word, the ambient sounds in a recording can lend an awful lot to the listening experience. One needs only to think of the importance of foley artists – those geniuses who add ‘sound effects’ to film soundtracks to further convince us that what we are seeing is real, however subtly.

Some examples of the types of audio that I have stumbled upon lately include an episode of This American Life, that fabulous series from Chicago Public Radio. In Accidental Documentaries, the first act tells the story of a “recorded letter” sent from a family to their son away at medical school. The family members each give a rundown of the minutiae of their daily lives to the son, and the whole package tells a lot more than the speakers perhaps intended. As is often the way with these things, the tapes ended up in a secondhand shop and the rest is history. The episode is available to stream online.

On from there, Radio New Zealand‘s long-running Spectrum featured a story about a tape recording club from Rotorua, and with members all over the world, all exchanging tapes in a circular tapesponding loop. This episode of Spectrum is available on RNZ’s website in MP3 and OGG formats.

Wanting to know more, I had a bit of a hunt on the web and found a great little site with some more information about the history of some of these tape recording clubs in the UK. Mark Vernon’s Meagre Resource website features brief histories of three different clubs, explaining that – again – his original interest was sparked by finding some tapes at a car boot sale. Vernon appears to have had a long and involved interest in radio and audio production, and he has made several programmes on the subject, featuring recordings from these sorts of tapes. Samples are available on his site, and a couple of the programmes themselves can be streamed at Sound and Music (and they are extremely well put together, and very entertaining!).

*****

All of this caught my imagination, and got me wishing I could have been involved in such a project. And then it occurred to me that, not only was I involved in one, I actually instigated it.

Running from December 2006 to August 2007, ‘my’ modest little podcast was created with the help of other members of a messageboard I have long frequented. The board was originally in support of Scottish band Biffy Clyro, and more recently as an off-shoot of the official board, populated by friends who met eachother there.

The Biffy Board Radio podcast was a simple idea, and has some parallels with the way Phyll Moore of Rotorua, and no doubt countless others, ran their tape clubs. With me as the ‘presenter’ and editor, I asked for those interested to record some vocals of them chatting and introducing a few songs, and for them to email me the recording, along with the songs they picked. Ostensibly it emerged out of the trend often found in online  communities of music fans wishing to spread the word about songs they love (or, more pessimistically, to brag about their wide-ranging and eclectic tastes!).

But more than that, I think it helped to connect our rather disparate collective in a way that the continuous, interwoven conversations of a messageboard can only go so far to do. Those unique elements of sound recordings again – accents, intonation, laughter – it was those elements that really brought to life some of the people we had never met.

The brief was simple, and there was more than enough interest and activity to fill nearly 20 hours of podcasts (albeit primarily with music). Friendships were bolstered through the podcast too – particularly my own, with a chap from Denmark who I’ve become good mates with, and we’ve both visited eachother more than once.

Listening back to the podcasts now and then really makes me smile. They were made with the absolute best possible intentions, and it is infectious hearing people tell jokes and introduce songs they are in love with. In this culture of sticking up a rapidshare link to an entire album with little personal input, it was the vocal introductions, whether with a biography of the artist, description of the artwork, or simply a back story on the announcer’s love affair with them, which really told you what you wanted to hear.

The production quality was rarely perfect; I was mixing together recordings from various sources in a mixture of Garageband and Audacity, whether they were from built-in computer mics or digital cameras. Some voices came through booming and distorted, others needed amplifying to make them audible. But the spirit was always there. And some of the music we played was fantastic. In later episodes, we even had a snappy jingle, cobbled together by my talented friend (and soon-to-be-housemate!) John Tucker.

As much for me as anyone else, the entire project is archived online, with all the completed episodes free to stream or download.

The whole project has provided me with lots of happy memories. Occasionally, the question of starting a second wave of podcasts is posed. However, for better or worse, the project existed at a time when our sub-community existed within a larger space, amongst strangers, and the podcast was just one of many ways of us keeping in touch and maintaining a collective identity. Board stalwart Chris Campbell went the distance in creating a Biffy Clyro fansite (amusingly entitled Biffier than thou) and, in doing so, created an unofficial messageboard.

When the official board went down for an extended period, many of the core members migrated across to this offshoot board, and have stayed there ever since. The board is still loosely linked to Biffy, but the unspoken vibe is that of a collection of ‘real life’ friends all just hanging out. In many ways, this newer board is just the natural progression of our social group as we have grown up, and is a close sibling to projects such as the Biffy Board Radio podcast.

*****

Finally, mention should be made on the subject of Audioboo – a cracking service that enables the user to record instant audio blogs which get sent to their twitter accounts and blogs. Big users of it include Stephen Fry and Documentally (the former helped put it on the map, the latter does it very well indeed, amongst others). The ease of use tends to lead to very natural, conversational descriptions of the recorder’s environment, often including ambient sounds and other voices. As a listener, if the subject is of interest, it really adds to your experience of following a topic of conversation or an event.

My biggest problem is that the service is largely tied to an iPhone app. Although I’m sure if I had an iPhone myself, I wouldn’t complain! However, restriction to the iPhone means you can generally expect fairly high audio quality, as audio recording is one thing all generations of iPhone do nicely.

Video is one thing people are getting more into, but if the likes of Audioboo can get people thinking about audio recording more often, then I’m all for it.