Wednesday 23 July, 2008

On My Way!

My adventure has begun! Please read my travel diary to find out where I am!

Sunday 20 July, 2008

Musical Endings (for now...)

I leave tomorrow for my trip, so tonight's Song of the Week update will be my last for the next couple of months. You can listen to my previous ten choices by visiting the song of the week archive. There is plenty of excellent music around at the moment and with a vast array of great music sites on the internet, all spreading the word on the latest releases, remixes and gigs, I seldom have to worry about choosing a suitable song each week.

My choice this week is Release Me by Oh Laura, a song originally made famous by its appearance on a Saab advert a while back. Having only got hold of the track this week (after finding the album lying around the house) it was nice to be reminded of what a great tune it is. If you like it, there are plenty of other great female singers around making similarly excellent music (okay, Oh Laura are a band, not a female solo artist, but you get my drift). In particular, I'd urge you to check out Regina Spektor, whose new single The Call is outstanding and harpist Joanna Newsom, who can only be desribed as eccentric!

Being away for the next seven weeks, I've been deciding recently on what music to take with me to listen to. I've chosen a selection of my favourite tracks, but will also be taking several whole albums and some tracks by new bands that I haven't listened to before. I'm delighted to be taking Sigur Rós' new album with me, which (judging by the first few tracks) promises to be a belter. I've also decided to take Josh Ritter's Historical Conquests with me. Its an album with a couple of superb singles, but as yet I haven't managed to listen to it as a full record. I'll also be taking new tracks by Be Your Own Pet, M83, Of Montreal, Deerhunter, Primal Scream, The Hold Steady and White Rabbits, as well as some bootlegs from the excellent owl and bear archive. I'm sure that if any of these are true gems, they'll be appearing as songs of the week on my return. Until then, please read my travel diary to keep up to date with where I am!

Wednesday 09 July, 2008

Counting Crows Live

Along with the rest of the family, I was fortunate enough to attend the Counting Crows' gig at the Liverpool Echo Arena last night. A sizeable venue is something that has been missing from Liverpool's host of live music outlets, but with the arrival of the European Capital of Culture crown this year, this is no more. The arena is excellent and will hopefully play host to much excellent entertainment in future years. Counting Crows are nearing the end of their International Tour, which has seen them play to crowds in the Netherlands, South Africa, Poland and France among others and finishes at T in the Park on Sunday. I know how good CC are live from the several live recordings that I have (check out this gig in particular) and as last night's gig was their only non-festival UK date on the tour, it is fair to say I was expecting big things from them. While their performance was superb, there were several small things that could have transformed the gig from a great experience to a truly amazing one.

After a decent set by support act The Hold Steady, a band I confess to knowing very little about, CC parade out onto the stage at 9:35pm, with frontman Adam Duritz announcing "I'm not gonna do much talking tonight, I wanna get all the songs in." And that's exactly what happened. Duritz seems the kind of guy who could establish a real rapport with his crowd given the chance, but rushed as he was last night didn't give him that chance. After the 14 song set they returned to play a couple of tracks as an encore, finishing bang on the dot at 11pm as no doubt forced to by the venue. Though I was also hoping for a longer set, my main problem with the scheduling was that it all felt a bit rushed. I also thought it was poor that the arena was at most 2/3 full. For a band like CC, the last thing I'd expect would be for them to be playing in front of empty seats.

Set List
Omaha
Hard Candy
Hanging Tree
Recovering the Satellites
Perfect Blue Buildings
Cowboys
Good Time
High Life
Angels of the Silences
When I Dream Of Michelangelo
Los Angeles
A Long December
Come Around
Mr. Jones

Meet on the Ledge (Fairport Convention cover)
Holiday in Spain

The set list was a nice mix of old and new with classics such as Angels of the Silences and Mr. Jones played alongside album tracks like High Life and Come Around. With a back catalogue as extensive and varied as CC I feel like I was always going to be disappointed that certain songs weren't played, but this set list was particularly so for me, with almost of all my favourites being overlooked. That said, it really only leaves me with a desire to see them again and after they exited the stage promising to be back in these shores in December I'm already enjoying the thought of a London gig at the end of the year.

Thursday 03 July, 2008

Latest News

I'm currently in full-on preparation mode for my trip to South America, trying to ensure I have everything I need, trying to find the best price for travel money, etc. However, I do have some little snippets of news to share with you. Firstly it's July and it feels like summer is finally here, so for my song of the week I chose my all-time favourite summer tune. Released when I was still a youthful adolescent back in 1999, Steal My Sunshine by Len is not the most musically brilliant song ever made, but it certainly gets you in a feel-good summery mood. Last week's song was actually a mashup of Feist's Inside + Out and Sufjan Steven's They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!, which I think works really well. Below I've posted several other excellent covers and mashups that I've been listening to recently. The Coldplay theme is very obvious: they do seem to be everywhere at the moment! Though I do like their album and think a few of the songs are absolutely fantastic, I wasn't blown away in the way I thought I might have been. My favourite album of the year so far remains Oracular Spectacular by MGMT.

[MP3] Coldplay - Viva La Vida (We Plants Are Happy Plants Remix)
[MP3] Bloc Party vs Coldplay - Hunting For Witches In My Place
[MP3] The Kooks - Violet Hill (Live in the BBC Radio One Live Lounge, 03-07-08)

I've had some excellent news in the last week when my Oxford exam results came out. Although I haven't had the full mark breakdown yet, I've been awarded a first class Masters degree (MMath) so I'm absolutely delighted. My darling twin sister has also finished her degree. She obtained a 2:1 in Fine Art (BA) from Oxford Brookes and is understandably chuffed. While she goes on to a further year of study on a PGCE course, I shall be living the life of a young professional in London, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Tuesday 10 June, 2008

Warning: Maths Below (For The Very Last Time!)

Finals are over! After three exams last week, I have no more academic exams to look forward to for the rest of my life. It's a strange feeling, having been examined in each of the past seven years, but a good one as I now have the rest of my life to look forward to. Next year promises to be enjoyable, exciting and fast-paced as I move to London to begin the life of a young professional, while before then I have the adventure of a trip across South America to look forward to. In the meantime, I shall be spending my summer first in Oxford with Susan and then back in Chester with my family. The weather since I finished on Friday has been wonderful and long may it continue.

Overall, I was pleased with how my exams went and I eagerly await results day on June 23rd to find out how I fared. Over the three exams I was asked to do such things as: showing that a metrizable space is separable if and only if it is Lindelöf, and that a Hausdorff, locally compact and non-compact space has a one-point compactification. In all honesty, I have very little idea of how any of the maths I have studied in the past year relates to the real world. I specialised in pure maths (and the purest of the pure, in fact), which is intrinsically studied for its own sake. My dissertation was on the subject of geometric group theory, which at least involved the study of the properties of certain real world structures and shapes. Although it is often interesting and enjoyable to study maths for its own sake, it is nice to actually see the theory applied somewhere. One of the most interesting areas that I studied for my dissertation was that of hyperbolic tessellations, which are essentially ways of tiling a circle. These even fascinated Escher who produced several pieces of art based around them (see below). I have uploaded my dissertation to this folder, for anybody who'd like to see what Masters-level maths looks like.

And so begins a summer of fun...