Now this is something that's been a little thin on the ground lately, between fatherhood (I know...definitely the most amazing thing in my life but that's not generally where I get creative ideas from), and work being demanding and the lack of being "out there". But this had a massive change this week, when I attended the annual Flash on the Beach conference.

I've been to this conference quite a few times over the years and, whilst it's normally great, this year was exceptional.

I'm going to blog in detail about this over at my "professional" web geek blog but the main thing I wanted to say here was just that I feel so excited about the current state of digital things in a way I haven't for years. It's making me want to learn, to code, to explore different media and different ideas, and to work with different people.

I don't know what the output will be yet, if anything at all - this is kind of more for myself and my own creative fulfillment (which tbh, I haven't felt since we finished the album nearly two years ago!).

Tell you what though, there are some awesome people doing awesome work at the moment and I definitely want to be a part of it:

[youtube]H_tOJDUUcuI[/youtube]

Andre Michelle @ FOTB 09.

I read something recently where they said that 98% of blogs are not updated, bar a post every 6 months to say "sorry I haven't written much recently, i'll do more in the future".

Sorry I haven't written much recently, I'll do more in the future.

Seriously though, music has taken a very back seat position whilst I've become a father. The two weeks around the birth of our son is, without question, the most surreal, emotional ride I have ever experienced in my life. It's been nearly three months and I still have to wonder if it really happened the way it did. From the stress leading up to it, to the impossibility of getting straight answers from the medical profession to the worries to the heartache of seeing the one you love in pain. The euphoria of the birth, the way that seeing into the big hole in your wife seemed perfectly normal, the exhaustion and, more than anything else, the relentlessness of the whole thing still marvels me.

...and it turns out the cliches, the really horrible cliches that made me cringe, really, really are true. The immediate sense of love and protection for the little one is overwhelming. I have never loved anything so intensely and so immediately in my life. There was a moment, two days after he'd been admitted to Intensive Care with breathing difficulties, where I was sitting by his incubator and just weeping tears of fear and sorrow. It's pretty undescribable.

I wonder if there's an album in it somewhere...

So since then, life has defaulted to routine really. I can bore for England about fatherhood now - speaking to my dad-friends is quite funny now, and disgusts Josh. Whether or not there is time for the intensitiy of focus that I tend to need to write is unsure at the moment. It's been a moot point anyway cause Samy is touring a lot right now. What we really need is a week or two away from it all, but that's probably out of the question at the moment. I've been messing around with a few things, and I definitely know what I'd want another album to sound like, but frankly, I can't see it happening until next year now.

More importantly though, I think i'm coming out of the period of bitterness I've had about music. Will post about this in depth another time, but I think it was just something I needed to get out of my system.

This is an article that I started writing for a FACT magazine contributor blog which, like most things Digitonal related at the moment, I just never got around to finishing. I publish here unedited and, like most of my rants, it's probably ill-advised, poorly researched and badly written:

enjoy :o)

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I've got a theory...actually I've got a few, which have been boring the electronica forums of the internet for some time now, but this is my current favourite:

There are now more people making electronic music than buying it.

I've no empirical evidence for this statement of course. It's just a feeling, an acid test if you will...dipping some universal indicator paper in the solution of the internet...But there really does seem to be an awful lot of it about and the problem, especially for an ardent music lover like myself with a disposable income and a strong desire to "do the right thing" when it comes to supporting the struggling artist, is how to filter it all. The feeling is fueled, largely, by myspace.com, the defacto standard solution for announcing your staggering musical genius to the world. I'm a big fan of the internet. I've made my career in helping build it. My "discovery" by the fledgling Toytronic records was thanks to mp3.com. It's been a powerful tool in helping me get tunes from where I make them to the ears of them that might like them. At some point, though, a balance was tipped in what producers might term "Signal vs Noise". By this I mean to say that the sheer volume of very well meaning youngsters dabbling in computer music, plus the cheap availability of some staggering powerful hardware and software has led to a massive influx of new electronic music. To paraphrase Dr Malcolm: "your musicians were so preoccupied with whether or not they could release albums, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Time was, we had systems in place to filter the signal from the noise - Record labels, an informed, interested music press, DJs as informed tastemakers and champions, a balanced radio spectrum with a specialist show for everything, and independent, community-orientated record shops. Post-Peel, the musical landscape is pretty bleak and now that we can't even sell records anymore, everything has been dropped to a level playing field.

Many will argue that this is a good thing. I can't help but extend the analogy to consider what happens when millions of people trample across the same playing field all day - it gets so muddy that you can't play on it anymore.

Of course, who am I, or anybody else to say that someone's music is worthy of being released or not? That surely is a job for market forces and their own tenacity...but in this level playing field of the digital music industry, it's getting really, really hard to find how who the next Aphex Twin actually is and just who is saying they are.

So until John Peel comes back from the dead, Alex Petredis stops fucking about and gets a job at a decent music paper or the kids put their cracked copy of ableton down and start buying records again, I shall continue to rely on my custom formula for myspace electronica browsing: Quality != electronica acts as influence + number of tracks finished per month + use of caps when announcing HOTT NEW TRAX + image based comments left.

More soon on why I can't be arsed...

Unbecoming though it undoubtably is to big up your mates, I can't help but note that Josh Posthuman is on some kind of unreal form at the moment.

Lander is due out later this year and is everything I like in dance music. He's also just remixed Ardisson which is a bona fide acid classic.

and then you've got his AGT work which is completely knocking it out of the park at the moment.

It really is about time that boy got his due props.

This is Ivy, a rescue cat from my wife's workplace. She's coming to stay with us for a while to see if she gets on with the three-legged terror of Mill Hill. She's a lovely 8-month old girlcat and I hope she keeps her claws out of the cable box.