I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SANDRO PERRI-Spaced Out EP [CST101] (2013).

Sandro Perri, plays jazzy music and sings in a gentle falsetto. I really enjoyed his album Impossible Spaces a lot.  This 10″ EP is composed  of 3 remixes from that album.  I happen to really dislike remixes that basically take one aspect of a song, add drums to it and repeat for 5 minutes.  Most dance remixes are pretty inane.  These are a step above that.

The three tracks are Love & Light (Larry Gus – Panamix), Wolfman (Le Révélateur – Sky Mix), and How Will I? (Imugem Orihasam – Outlook Mix).

The original of Love and Life is a pretty, jazzy number with some great sounding drums and synth notes.

The remix opens with some really fast clicking and some cool wild bass synth.  Then Perri’s voice is manipulated into a kind of repeating note.  Once the song starts properly there’s a cool drums beat and repeats of Perri singing “hey” along with his voice played low in the mix.  And that’s Brett much it.  It’s simple but insanely catchy/dancey.  The song pauses in the middle and then resumes with new vocal snippets The Constellation site says the remix “employs over 500 samples extracted from the song’s stems. The result is an intricate, dense, exuberantly satisfying groove-based track that chops and channels the woozy rhythmic complexity and mellifluous vocal of the original.”

“Wolfman” is a ten minute track that I love–it has so many components and different styles. But this remix strips away pretty much all of it.  It is basically 5 and a half minutes of drums with some wavering synth lines.  About 3 minutes in some ooh oohs from the original track come in, but it’s so removed from the track that I almost wonder why bother.  Well, Constellation is there to tell us: Roger Tellier-Craig (Fly Pan Am, Pas Chic Chic), reworks “Wolfman” as a beautifully building swarm of layered loops and long delays – an homage of sorts to Perri’s own Polmo Polpo sound palette.”  And if that’s what you are expecting, he does it well.

I also love the original of “How Will I.”  This version is very strange.  The music is stripped almost all away with just some occasional sprinkling of piano and rumblings of low notes in the background.  There are additions of synths and percussion but otherwise it is largely a stripped down song.  What I loved about the original was the music—the flutes and everything–and it’s all gone.  I do love at 7 minutes when the bass rumbles through the song, but otherwise its pretty samey.  Constellation tells us: “Japanese producer Imugem Orihasam (Fragil) extrapolates a sweet and loose abstract-House vibe from the original, bringing the highly detailed swing of the song’s live drum tracks to the fore, allowing Perri’s vocal to unfurl against a minimal, skittering, plunderphonic arrangement.”

So, this is not a release I would play very much.

[READ: October 3, 2016] Secret Coders: Paths and Portals

Secret Coders ended with a  pretty big cliffhanger.

Hopper and Eni are on to something big at their school, Stately Academy.  They have just discovered a robot which (through their own programming) has opened up a portal to a secret underground lab. But it is the lab of Mr Bee.  Oh, and that bully Josh has decided he wants to help them.  Hopper says no way, but Josh doesn’t give up.  However, he’s kind of a coward and a little dumb and Hopper is really quite mean to him back.

Eventually they all start working together–Josh has mad typing skills.  And the beginning of the book shows the trio learning to write a program for the Robot Turtle to run. Coding isn’t a terribly exciting thing to watch, but Yang and Holmes do it in a cool way that makes it rather enjoyable.  Even (or maybe especially) when the kids screw up.

But they do succeed.  Which leads to an even more secret room with dozens of robot turtles off all sizes  And that’s when Mr Bee reveals a bit about himself and Stately Academy.

Stately Academy was built on The Bee School, a school designed to teach and to allow students to teach in return.  They experimented with programming and had their robot turtles do amazing things.   And somehow Hooper’s dad was involved–although every time she tries to find out how they knew each other, the bell rings.

But Hooper is leaning a ton–although maybe not in her actual classes.  She learns to uses a tiny robot (that she “borrows”) to do her boring Mandarin homework.  The turtles can hold a pen and draw lines, which Hopper programs it to do.  It takes longer than it would have of she had written the words herself, but she enjoys the real challenge.  She also asks us to try to write the same program she did (and lets us compare answers with her), which is kind of fun.  Of course, she gets in trouble for her programming because her hand writing looks too perfect.  And the principal wants to know what she used to create this.

And that’s when a real enemy comes up–the rugby team.  They don’t like Hopper to  begin with and when the principal gets them on his side, she is in trouble.

Hopper, Eni, and Josh learn a bit more about programming (using variables) and design some cool stuff, but they are soon set upon by the rugby team who were sent by the principal to capture their turtle.

As this book ends, there is trouble afoot.  The rugby team has their turtle and the Principal has Mr Bee–with clearly bad intentions.

Yet another cliffhanger!

But there’s also some extra backstory.  We meet Eni’s whole family.  He has three sisters who have been really mean to Hopper.  Hopper is very cocky about her basketball skills even though she doesn’t have any (it has to do with her dad).  And the trio are happy to shut her down.  Although their mom and dad seem very nice to her (and to each other, which is a big contrast for Hopper).  But their life turns upside down when Eni turns down a chance to meet a high school coach about basketball because he was to help with the coding.

I have no idea how many books are planned for this series, but in addition to being very educational, it’s also pretty exiting–with many threads left open until volume 3.  I can’t wait!