Where Worlds Collide

Very good post on the role of a moderator on online forums.

The rule of thumb I find useful both there and here (and, more importantly given the way people’s internet habits are changing, over on Facebook where blog content is imported) is to approach moderation the same way a good chair would approach chairing a public meeting.

Giving people a chance to have their say is right up there at the top of the list of objectives for chairing. Alongside it are other considerations like trying to give lots of people in the meeting the chance to have their say: the free speech of one person shouting down whatever anyone else says infringes the free speech of all the others also wanting to talk.

While it’s obvious that political (and for that matter, religious) forums are far more likely to turn toxic, at least in theory, than those devoted to subjects like model railways or music, I’ve always found that many online community sites are only as good as their moderators.

The point about shouting down others is a very good point. What’s worse is when the shouting down isn’t just one disruptive individual but two or three backing each other up. It seems to me that it’s a case of “civil behaviour”, “high traffic”, “no moderation”, pick any two. Do nothing to rein them in, and the loud aggressive types will drive away many of the more reasonable posters, who might otherwise have made a useful contribution, but find the online atmosphere too unpleasant. It’s why, for example, I give the official Marillion forum a very wide berth.

Although sometimes I wonder whether at least some of the trolls aren’t necessarily malicious, but demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to online discourse. This would explain why they always blame ‘the other guy’ when a thread turns nasty.

Blogs are a bit different, in that many of them are very much personal soapboxes, and their owners primary interest isn’t to build a community around the blog - those such as Making Light are very much the exception here.

2010 has been an annus horribilis for the prog scene. It started with Heather leaving Mostly Autumn, with knock-on effects on Breathing Space. Touchstone parted company with their drummer. Crimson Sky parted company with their singer. And Karnataka imploded altogether, just days before a gig. Even Panic Room had to find a new bass player. And that’s before we get to the major league bands like Dream Theater losing Mike Portnoy. It’s got to the point where I daren’t speculate on what might happen next lest it happens.

And now there’s one more.

As announced today on The Reasoning’s website, guitarist, vocalist and founder member Dylan Thompson is leaving the band.

We are saddened to advise you all that Dylan Thompson has resigned from The Reasoning with immediate effect. His decision is a personal one and we all respect that. Over the past five years we have shared much fun and creativity together. All of The Reasoning wish Dylan every happiness and success for the future.

Whilst this event has obviously come as a surprise, The Reasoning’s November tour dates will very definitely be going ahead.

It’s a real shock. I know that The Reasoning have gone through a lot of lineup changes since I first saw them live at The Uplands Tavern in Swansea in January 2007, but Dylan, as well as being a really great guy was always part of the creative heart of the band, co-writing almost all of their material. He will surely be missed.

When a core member leaves a band, there are always going to be fears for the future. But look at how many people wrote off Mostly Autumn after a similar enforced lineup change at the beginning of the year, and even those of us who were guardedly optimistic had our doubts. Then look how strongly they bounced back.

As the announcement says, the November tour will be going ahead, with a slimmed-down 5-piece version of the band.

Which is where I put random thoughts on things I’ve read which aren’t worth a full-blown blog post, but still worth more than a throwaway link on Twitter.

First, the utter beigeness of The Q Awards. Are Kasabian really the best band in the world? It does make me wonder who actually reads Q nowadays. Is it people in the 30s and 40s who no longer either buy albums or get to gigs, but like to think they’re still in touch with what’s going on in music, and don’t want to be told that they aren’t?

Next, the Guardian Music Blog post on the Japanese genre of “Visual Kei”. It seems to be a combination the worst excesses of 80s fashion disasters set to some utterly derivative power metal. It gets a lot of rotten tomatoes in the comments, some of which come from me. A commenter linked to an interview with an (unnamed) Visual Kei record executive, which lays bare the sordid sausage-factory nature of the entire scene, and how it’s cynically exploitative of both musicans and fans. And I thought the US/UK music industry was bad.

Charlie Stross has always been one of my favourite science-fiction authors, and his blog is always an excellent, thought-provoking read. Recent posts have included outlines of novels he might have written but didn’t and some wise thoughts on the bursting of the higher education bubble. His latest rant is a broadside against the Steampunk genre, which in his opinion is far from “what happens when Goths discover brown”, it is, according to Stross, all about romanticising too many bad things about the past. Like High Fantasy, only even worse, is the conclusion.

Finally, BBC’s Mark Easton is trying to work out why “Olivia” is the most popular girl’s name this year. He has one or two possibly half-baked ideas:

As for Olivia - even digitally re-mastered pictures of Olivia Newton-John wearing “those trousers” in the movie Grease cannot provide an explanation.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are witnessing one of the subconscious side-effects of a Mediterranean diet. All that olive oil and low-fat spread. Could it be that our eating habits are affecting the way we fill out birth certificates?

Now, while I’d love to think they were all named after Mostly Autumn’s new singer, somehow I think Mostly Autumn fans haven’t been breeding at that sort of rate.

It’s always hard for any band to replace their lead singer of many years, especially when it’s someone as talented and much-loved as Heather Findlay, and frequently the new singer has an uphill struggle to win over diehard fans. Add to this the fact that the past two albums, while they certainly both had their moments, both met with a decidedly mixed reaction from many fans, and you can see why Go Well Diamond Heart, Mostly Autumn’s ninth studio album, is really a make or break album for the band.

Former backing singer Olivia Sparnenn has already made a strong impression on stage during the spring tour in her new role as lead singer, but the new studio album is the way the revamped lineup will ultimately be judged, especially by those who haven’t had the chance to see the new-look Mostly Autumn live.

So does the new album succeed? After a few listens, I think it does.

This album is definitely one of those classed as “a grower”. While a handful of tracks made a strong impression on the first play, much of the album didn’t really come to life until I’d listened to the whole thing half a dozen times. I’ve read a one or two forum posts from people who seem to have written it off as ‘not very good’ after one or two plays. They should stick with it; it will be worth it in the end.

While some of the songs are not quite as immediately melodic as previous releases, the melodies are still there, they’re just a bit more subtle. The production is a lot rawer; rather than the polished approach of earlier albums this one has a very “live” feel to it, especially Bryan Josh’s guitar sound. Quite a few songs begin on acoustic guitar, switching to distorted electric part-way through. One thing that’s very noticeable is the number of times Bryan really cuts loose on lead guitar. On the last album, “Glass Shadows” I felt his playing was a little bit too mannered and restrained, with relatively little lead guitar; this time around he plays a blistering solo on almost every song.

Fans of Breathing Space will of course be aware of Olivia Sparnenn’s talents as a singer. While her predecessor is inevitably going to be a really hard act to follow, Olivia acquits herself superbly. Her singing continues to develop; while she’s clearly not trying to sound like Heather (which would have been a mistake), she’s not singing in the quite same way she did with Breathing Space either. There are certainly moments where she uses her power and range to great effect, such as the closing section of “Deep in Borrowdale” where she demonstrates the voice that can allegedly shatter wineglasses.

And it’s also great to hear Iain Jennings back on keys. While it seems ages ago that he rejoined the band for the tour promoting “Glass Shadows” in 2008, this is actually the first Mostly Autumn studio album he’s played on since 2005′s “Storms Over Still Waters”. It’s also worth noting that while Gavin Griffiths has also toured with the band extensively in recent year, it’s the first time he’s played drums for them in the studio.

The first disk, which will be released as the retail edition in November starts extremely strongly with “For All We Shared”, with it’s lengthy celtic-style atmospheric introduction featuring Troy Donockley’s Uilleann pipes leading into Bryan’s acoustic opening verse before building into a superb mid-tempo rocker with Olivia singing lead. With it’s quintessential Mostly Autumn sound it wouldn’t have sounded that out of place on the album of that title. In contrast, “Violet Skies” (Now there’s a Mostly Autumn song title if ever there was one), also sung by Olivia and dedicated to Heather Findlay is a catchy four-minute pop song which would make a great single. “Deep in Borrowdale” and “Something Better” are both hard rockers; the latter musically excellent but somewhat spoiled by some truly awful lyrics.

The title track is quite harrowing if you know the back story. It’s dedicated to Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, a Mostly Autumn fan serving in Afghanistan, critically wounded by a landmine. The album closes with three songs co-written by Olivia Sparnenn, the last of which “And When The War Is Over” again featuring Troy’s pipes, and to my ears is has the same feel as some of Roger Waters’ solo material, musically if not lyrically.

The second disk, available only in the limited edition is more a diverse collection of songs, but these cannot be described as left-overs; the best songs are as good as anything on the first disk. High points are the atmospheric “Ice”, co-written by Iain Jennings, “Hats Off” dedicated to the late Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, and Olivia Sparnenn’s soaring “Forever Young”, very reminiscent of her work with Breathing Space.

I was a bit worried when I read the announcement that the special edition was to be a double album. I remember 2006′s “Heart Full of Sky” where the band had stretched themselves too thin trying to come up with two albums worth of material in a short space of time, resulting in an album that seemed rushed with too many songs that sounded half-finished. This time they’ve managed to avoid that; while there are one or two songs on the second disk that don’t quite work (at least for me), there is far more that one CD’s worth of great material here.

The 2-disk limited edition is available from Mostly Autumn records while remaining stocks last. The single-disk retail edition goes on sale in mid-November.

At the beginning of the year Heather Findlay shocked the progressive rock world by announcing that she was leaving Mostly Autumn after more than a decade to embark on a solo career. The band announced that no way could she be allowed to leave without a proper goodbye. So she would be making one last farewell appearance with the band, at The Assembly in Leamington Spa on Good Friday. Shortly afterwards came the announcement that the show would be recorded for a DVD release.

This is that DVD.

Beginning with the now familiar opener “Fading Colours”, the first disk shows a tight, professional performance, typical of their shows throughout last year captured on the two excellent “Live 2009″ CDs. But the second half of the show ratchets up the emotional intensity by several notches, and by the end it’s actually quite draining to watch. This is a band really putting their heart and soul into the music, and some of the band are close to tears by the end. As are many of the audience.

The setlist is pretty much the same as the band were playing towards the end of last year, a greatest hits set skewed slightly in favour of Heather’s songs; all-time favourites like “Shrinking Violet”, “Evergreen”, “Passengers” and “Carpe Diem” as well as recent songs like the powerful “Unoriginal Sin”. The DVD includes the entire two and a half hour show, completely unedited, with all the song introductions, and the emotional farewells at the end.

While the band’s performance is absolutely “as it happened”, they’ve clearly taken a great deal of care in the mixing, mastering and video editing, and that time and effort has paid off. Audio and video quality are both excellent; every instrument and voice of the eight-piece band can be heard clearly, including Anne-Marie Helder’s flute and Olivia Sparnenn’s backing vocals, and the camerawork is excellent given the limitations of the venue’s stage lighting. The video editing is absolutely superb, and really manages to capture what it’s like to be in the front row at a Mostly Autumn gig. Closeups of band members naturally favour Heather, and to a lesser extent Bryan Josh. Anne-Marie gets a fair bit of camera time during the flute solos, although you only get occasional glimpses of one or two of the band.

As someone who was there, this DVD not only succeeds in capturing the atmosphere of that emotional night, but shows what a class act Mostly Autumn can be on stage, and of course, shows what a great singer and charismatic frontwoman they had in Heather Findlay. I look forward to her solo career with great interest.

Just eight days later, Mostly Autumn took to the stage again in Gloucester, with former backing vocalist Olivia Sparnenn taking over as the band’s new lead singer. But that’s another story.

The DVD is available from Mostly Autumn Records.

Having scrapped my previous model railway layout following an enforced relocation due to work, I’m in a position to make a fresh start. My new place has an attic space giving me a significantly bigger layout space than I had before. It’s approximately fourteen feet long and nine feet wide, although the stairwell and and chimney breast cut two corners out of one side, resulting in an irregular area with the full room length available on one side, and about ten feet clear along the other.

I’ve considered dusting off some pipe-dreams, filling the entire area with one big layout; in N that’s actually quite a big space, and I’ve worked out a way of fitting a Par+St.Blazey layout into the given area.

However, given that I’m into both British and Swiss outline modelling, my current thinking is to build two smaller layouts rather than attempting to fill the entire room with one big one. A larger semi-permanent one with a focus on operation along the rear wall, and a slightly smaller one transportable for exhibition use along the front wall.

For the past eight years Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist has been essential reading if you want to know what’s wrong with the world view of large parts of the religious right. He blogs a lot about the excesses of rightwing fundamentalism from an evangelical Christian perspective. Among other things he’s been dissecting the appalling but hugely popular “Left Behind” series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, pointing out not only how bad they are theologically, but why the utterly fail as literature. A constant theme is how a mindset based on fear and anger is completely at odds with what the central message of Christianity is supposed to be.

And he’s on form today:

Your aunt, unfortunately, didn’t mention either your name or hers when she drunk-dialed me Thursday to let me know I was at the top of the list of Bad People she’s praying against due to my supposedly contributing to your doubts about the inerrancy and infallibility of the footnotes in the Scofield Reference Bible.

Your aunt was too intoxicated — three sheets to the wind on self-righteous indignation — for me to make a great deal of sense of your situation or hers. She is, I think, your father’s sister, and she used to live in California, but now has an area code that Google tells me is in the really lovely part of Washington State. She seems to really enjoy telling people that if they believe in evolution then they don’t believe in the Bible. And by “the Bible” she’s apparently referring to some set of scriptures that includes the Complete Works of Hal Lindsey.

Read the whole thing.

Less than a week after we received the DVD “That Night in Leamington”, which I really need to review, the Mostly Autumn news blog tells us pre-order copies of the new album “Go Well-Diamond Heart” are being dispatched, and indeed some people are already reporting having received it.

I can’t wait to hear it - advanced reviews have been very positive, and there is an awful lot hanging on this release for the band as their first one with new singer Olivia Sparnenn.

Comes from The Guardian’s Mark Beaumont, in a blog post about Radiohead’s Kid A

By the mid-noughties, just like the mid-90s, alternative and mainstream were conjoined by a frothing mass media and shrinking major-label budgets – there seemed little distance between Kasier Chief and Sugababe, between Arctic Monkey and Crazy Frog. There was nowhere for an underground to be.

That really does speak wonders about the smallness of cultural bubble that “mainstream” music critics inhabit, doesn’t it? Just about all the music I love just simply doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

I have a reputation for being opinionated and argumentative online, which is one reason I don’t post much on band forums nowadays - there are too many self-important sycophants who take offence, often on behalf of others, at what was intended as constructive criticism. So now I’m back baiting Guardian music journalists again.

Such an example is Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ Guardian Music Blog piece attempting to praise the guitar talents Mark McGuire, which starts with this opening paragraph:

Claims for the greatness of guitarists are often badly skewed. Many seem to regard guitar playing in a similar way to skateboarding, that greatness is about isolated feats of technical brilliance (an idea which Guitar Hero taps into and perhaps slyly satirises). Therefore songwriting from the likes of Dragonforce, and to a lesser extent Van Halen, Queen, and Guns’n'Roses is modular: guitar theatrics slotted into a framework, rather than folded into songs.

To which my first reaction is “Oh dear”.

Whatever you might think of Mark McGuire’s music (It sounds interesting, reminds me a bit of Matt Stevens or even very early instrumental-era Twelfth Night), I still maintain that opening with a thinly-veiled slur at Dragonforce (of whom I’m not a particular fan) is equivalent to me opening a review of someone like Panic Room with a paragraph about why I think The Libertines are rubbish. It would rightly be a distraction from the main body of the article.

After getting a few responses from the author in the comments, I realised that the thing wasn’t just about McGuire’s music at all, but was using him as a hook to hang a piece fetishising lack of technique. But far from being the iconoclastic position he implies it to be, all he’s doing is restating the orthodox position of the majority of rock critics from the past thirty years. 17-year old Dragonforce fans do not represent the establishment; that position is held by 40-something old punks. And I believe their attitude is deeply damaging to music. As commenter Troyka says:

Since the punk era it has been the norm to pretend that technique and ability don´t matter as much as enthusiasm. The result of which we can see in the uniform dullness of a lot of today´s younger guitarists (in the U.K at least).

Which is pretty much why we haven’t seen any great guitarists emerge in mainstream British music for at least 15 years. Yes, there are plenty of younger guitarists in metal, blues or prog, but they’re minority genres and largely aren’t on the BBC/NME/Guardian/Q radar screen.