TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue does the same for every Doctor Who episode in existence and is, if anything, even more thorough, with the occasional piece that is nothing but historical/cultural context.

Bicycles are not instantly accessible so it's still possible to review and discuss them the old-fashioned way, and they don't really lend themselves to reviewing in historical sequence (though if anyone would give that a try, I'd read it), but Lovely Bicycle contextualises them anyway, and shows you how beautiful they can be.

No go forth and read!

In an effort to catch up with Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's schedule without compromising the art quality, I asked Yonaka to do some backgrounds for me. She'd done this once before, and that was very satisfactory indeed. Working over the Internet meant I could get the page to and from Georgia (the U.S. state, not the former Soviet Republic), but at a price. This is a scaled version of the scanned page that I sent to Yonaka. I put it on a web server and emailed her the URL plus instructions. I told her I wanted a realistic rendition of the space the scene was set in in all panels except the third and fourth, which should feature a historical narrative rendered in wood carving style, ca. 1000 AD. Yonaka knows from carving, and she knows her history, but I sent her a reference from a Norwegian stave church portal anyway.

Black and white line art without background. Click to enlarge

Yonaka simply prints the scanned page out on an inexpensive inkjet printer. The line quality suffers somewhat in this process, but because the scans are high-res to begin with, it doesn't really show in the final result, at least not on the Web. I may run into trouble if I try to make a print version, though. Yonaka then simply drew the background in pencil, on the print-out. It's really low-budget. Because the third panel was so much work, she posted the an intermediate version of the page on her website for me to check out, before continuing with panel 4. The third panel is in pencil, with pencil shading. The other panels, however, are in ink.

Line art with Yonaka's backgrounds. Click to enlarge.

Once I'd approved panel 3, which I did quite enthusiastically, Yonaka drew the background for panel 4. It's looking quite crowded now...

Final backgrounds including the fourth panel. Click to enlarge.

The final colored artwork, without the lettering. I didn't have to do much on panels 3 and 4. Even a flat color over the entire area brought out the relief in Yonaka's drawings.

Digital colours by me, as done in 2004. Click to enlarge.

After that, the page got its lettering, and with that done, the page was flattened (i.e. all the layers were reduced to a single layer), scaled to web size and posted. Eight years later, I revisited it as part of the remaster project, and this gives me an opportunity to show what sort of changes I've made. This is what the artwork looks like now, when its at the same stage as in the previous image, coloured but not lettered:

Artwork with 2012 revisions by me. Click to enlarge.

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OK, that works well enough. I plan to write more blog posts again, but write them offline in an external editor, so I'm more focused. I recently downloaded two full-screen editors for Mac, IAwriter and Ulysses, both of which have full-screen modes that allow for writing with minimal distraction. Of these, IAwriter works with Markdown syntax, and I've found that using Markdown is an excellent way to perform essential markup without breaking my train of thought, so I've added it to this blog in the hope of finally getting some reviews written. Watch this space.

To the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan site

And in the age of Spotify, that's what you need! There is no point in anyone writing a review based on two or three listens when you can just link the reader to the Spotify URL. Indeed I've already heard most of 50 Words for Snow through the NPR First Listen stream. For a quick first impression, the album itself will do quite nicely, thank you very much. But living with the songs for months and giving a considered opinion on them, is still useful.

Let it be known than that I've found Director's Cut alternately uplifting and infuriating. I would hate it on one listen, then put it on again a day later and find it not so bad, then put it on again and hate it again. Over time, most of the songs grew on me, but some utterly fell flat over time.

The fact that these are songs I've lived with in their original form for much longer doesn't help. Every change in nuance gets filtered through the comparison with the originals. Where Kate's voice is a bit weaker, where a favorite bit of instrumentation is missing, the new version is the one that suffers. Only over time did I find that stripping down the old layers of instruments gave the remaining ones more time to shine, and that the vocal changes, while sometimes highlighting a loss of range and power compared to the original versions of the songs from 1989 and 1993, were largely well-considered and the work of an artist very much in control of what she wants out of her instrument.

The bad That isn't to say it always works. "Flower of the Mountain" continues to suffer from the comparison with the original "The Sensual World" - the lyrics Kate wrote when she wasn't allowed to use the Molly Bloom soliloquy in 1989 fit and flowed better, her voice was (not to put too fine a point on it) sexier and the production didn't have a hair out of place. On "Deeper Understanding", Kate articulates like K9 from the classic Doctor Who series and the track doesn't get off the ground until after the vocal part is over. And let's not get started on "Rubberband Girl": there is a decent musical jam hidden under the mumbled vocals, with drummer Steve Gadd and bass player Danny Thompson giving it their best, but it's hardly audible under the muffled production.

The good The rest of the album, though, is pretty good, and once I made an abbreviated playlist of it without the songs that didn't work, I found myself playing it regularly over a sustained period of time. "Lily" sounds less urgent but more claustrophobic and builds up its energy slowly over the course of the track. "The Red Shoes" now sounds like something you actually want to dance to. "Never be Mine" has layers of artifice stripped from it, all the way down to simplifying the chorus. It wears its emotion on its sleeve instead of dancing around it. "Top of the City" and "And So Is Love" are more subtly reworked and are musically hard to tell apart from the originals (even after seven months!), but do appear to have a little more breathing room to them.

The great "This Woman's Work", one of three completely re-recorded songs, is a completely different song now. With its chiming, reverberating, minimal keyboard accompaniment and desperate, yearning vocals it sounds bleak, raw like an open wound. "Moments of Pleasure", on the other hand, has been changed to be more uplifting - compared to the original, it is like a scar that has healed up. Kate's vocal on this new version is jazzier, and looser, sounding like she's singing for the joy of singing. These two tracks must have been where things started to fall into place for the next album. The same glee can be found in "Song of Solomon", my favorite from the album. It's lost a little in subtlety, but it's gained in momentum, with Kate pushing herself through an abrupt sonic shift in the bridge to that raucous "Wop-bam-boom". Here, Kate's aged voice is sexy, succeeding where "Flower of the Mountain" didn't do the trick.

Taken as a whole, Director's Cut is a fine record in its own right that has proven to be a grower. I now rate it above Aerial, reversing a twenty-five-year trend in which each new Kate Bush album did less for me than the previous one (to be fair, she only released three albums during that period). But did it need to be made at all?

Back in April/May, that question was a real poser. Knowing what we know now, it's easier to answer. Director's Cut was a dry run, a test for Kate's new studio setup and record label. It also scratched an itch that needed to be dealt with before she could move on to the next record. From interviews, it turns out that Director's Cut was very difficult to make, but once Kate was done, the next album was very easy. Recording this album jumpstarted the creative process and resulted in a new album within a year. As new Kate Bush records are normally so rare, that alone should make it worthwhile. That the actual album is listenable at all is a bonus - that 75% of it is this good is a blesssing.

Listen to Director's Cut on Spotify

However, it pays to be vigilant, and I just found this, which I shall fix in an instance. But with that out of the way, the benefits should outweigh the disadvantages. Please let me know if there are other aspects that I need to look into, or if you think there are better alternatives available that fit my criteria better.

My plan is to announce comic and websites on there, nothing more, nothing less. I will continue to post them here as well.

My other plan is to do something concrete for the comic every day that my day job sucks. So yesterday I made the feed; today I ...tell people about it through my existing channels. Any step, no matter how tiny, will count, but it has to be completed, so "Working on an update" only counts if an update is finished that day.

The Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan remaster project started in 2006 as a way to upgrade some of the earlier comics from their poorly-scanned, tiny images. Remastered versions of several stories were posted on my DeviantArt site and on the Drunk Duck mirror site for ROCR, but it wasn't until recently that I've started posting new ones on the main site, working both backwards from the end of the story The Corby Tribe and forward from the start of The Rite of Serfdom.

The project has been beset by accidents and hardware failures including the simultaneous failure of both my main and secondary system, located at the time on two different continents, in late 2009, at a time when an earlier incident had caused me to temporarily lose faith in automated back-up software. That faith has since been somewhat restored, but some of the earlier remasters, including much of the work for The Corby Tribe, have already been lost and will need to be redone.

Currently, the remaster process involves work on scans that were high-res, but low bit depth, which at the time were coloured in on the main layer. The gutters and panel borders are cleaned out, then on a new layer, the line art is improved, with particular attention on areas where the low-bit depth lines run into each other, causing areas of the art to become crowded. Sometimes, new detail is added that will be visible on the larger final images. The art is re-lettered, with British spellings now the norm for all pages, and sometimes new word balloons are drawn using Photoshop. In addition, some pages are redrawn entirely from scratch and some characters, particularly Maghreid, Abúi and P'Séaigg are partly redrawn and recoloured nearly every time they appear. Final results are suitable as source images for even higher-res remasters in the future, and for print in the unlikely event that there is real interest. The work is done in 15-minute blocks during the working week, and in longer blocks of time during the weekends.

The remaster project should be complete by the time my wife is ready to work in the Netherlands, by which time I should be able to work fewer hours in my day job and get back to regular production of new work. That could be as early as next year, or as late as 2015.

Spotify has playlist sharing as a feature, and I've enjoyed some blogs that use sharing to spread, such as Spotify Classical. I think even more than YouTube, this feature will change how people write about music, with 'music criticism as consumer advice' becoming completely obsolete, and 'music commentary as swapping notes' replacing it. So heres an attempt, and if it's not too much work I'll do it every week or so. Here are some songs that caught my attention in the past few weeks.

This is the playlist and because I don't expect everyone to have Spotify, I'll try to find alternate links for the songs as much as possible.

1. Nicole Atkins: Brooklyn's On Fire off Neptune City, 2007. The opening bars of this, after the instrumental intro, just fill me with joy every time I hear them. While I'm still gushing over those chanted phrases, the song develops into a lush 6/8 melody with even lusher strings. And what a voice. The one thing I am not sold on is the lead guitar, but I can ignore it easily.

2. Kate Bush: The Song of Solomon off Director's Cut, 2011 The second song on Director's Cut, and the second song I ever heard on Spotify as the main trigger for me getting Spotify was to hear this album the moment it was available. As long-term readers may have guessed from the lack of a review of the album, I'm lukewarm about Director's Cut as a whole. Some of the songs work, some don't. "Song of Solomon" is one of the songs that do deliver on the album's promise: Kate has succesfully shaken the cobwebs off the original production and added gorgeous, sexy new vocals and understated live percussion. If all of the album was this good, I'd be all over it.

3. Unicorn Ensemble: Nevestinko Oro off The Glory of Early Music, 1997. This instrumental tune is the traditional dance that Kate Bush based "The Sensual World"/"Flower of the Mountain" on, and it's quite gorgeous in its own right. The Glory of Early Music is a Naxos compilation of music from before the era of the Classical composers, and that colours this interpretation. The version in the Youtube vid is the same one, even if credited differently.

4. The Damned: Grimly Fiendish off Phantasmagoria, 1985. (This is an actual video, so I'm showing it larger) I saw this on Shakesville and loved it from the opening bars on. I did find myself checking the video to see where Captain Sensible was, before concluding that evidently he wasn't on it. That shows how little I knew about the Damned: I had some inkling that they'd had a bunch of line-up changes, splits and reunions, some of which did and some which did not include the Captain. I also knew that they were one of the legends of punk rock, that they'd changed styles a lot, and that they'd made quite a few albums that didn't live up to the group's reputation. But I was fuzzy on the details, and hadn't actually heard much of their music. After hearing this, I'm trying very hard to catch up. To some people, this early goth hit off 1985's Phantasmagoria will be among the records that don't live up to the group's reputation, but I can't get enough of it. Musically, it sounds like a cross between Adam Ant and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, with harpsichords for extra colour. The delivery is confident, like a group on top of its game, and the singer's voice just fits. Phantasmagoria as a whole doesn't convince me yet, but this single is one I can listen to over and over again, and have.

5. Martyn Joseph: Giant Panda's Giant Thoughts off The Wildlife Album, 2005 I found the The Wildlife Album compilation while looking for Roy Harper songs on Spotify. The Wildlife Album is an acoustic, singer-songwriter oriented charity compilation including some big names such as Harper, Bert Jansch and Jan Akkerman, some second-tier names like Gordon Giltrap and Steve Ashley, and some artists that I hadn't heard of before at all. Martyn Joseph is in the latter category for me, and stood out because of his bluesy, tasty guitar playing. Nothing special, just very well done. Oh, and the lyrics made me laugh with their panda's-eye-view. I could not find this one on YouTube, sorry.

6. Movits!: Äppelknyckarjazz off Äppelknyckarjazz, 2008 My old friend DFG sent me this and I loved it at once. Sweden's Movits! Seem to be the missing link between Caro Emerald and Kaizers Orchestra - more polished than the latter, more edgy than the former.

7. Janelle Monáe: Tightrope featuring Big Boi, off The ArchAndroid, 2010 Video here, embedding disabled Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon repeatedly praised Janelle Monáe's concept album The ArchAndroid as the best album of 2010. I don't know if it's quite that good; it's not exactly genre-defying and the album drags a bit in the second half. But knowing me, the time to ask me what the best album of 2010 was will be around 2015. The ArchAndroid is good enough, though, to break my resistance to contemporary R&B, and this track in particular, with its funky beat, smooth bass line and Monáe's vocals, is one of the things that have been bringing joy to my life lately.

8. Corvus Corax: Satyricon, off Seikilos, 2002 Another band that I've known about for years now, but never got around to digging into. Aggie's seen these guys live in Germany and reports that they're very good and entertaining live. I now have a Spotify playlist for this genre of music, containing about 200 tracks. This instrumental is one of their most popular and it did jump out at me at first listening. I expect there'll be more of this type of music in Saturday Spotify posts if I do more of them.

9. Happy Rhodes: Ra is a Busy God, off Many Worlds Are Born Tonight, 1998 (Video is not the studio recording, but a live recording from one of Happy Rhodes' house concerts. These have probably reached more people than the concerts originally did). I purchased about 60 Happy Rhodes tracks in one swell foop from both iTunes and Spotify, after doing price comparisons for each album to get the cheapest combination. This did result in me getting Happy Rhodes overload, and I still have a hard time identifying which of these 60 tracks are my favorites. This track from Many Worlds Are Born Tonight, her only album that charted, is a contender. But it doesn't really matter anyway, because what I love about Happy Rhodes is her voice. I don't really care what she sings, as long as I can listen to her singing.

10. Siousxie and the Banshees: Cities in Dust, off Tinderbox, 1986. For years I had this mentally misfiled as being by Sinéad O'Connor. Upon hearing it again, it doesn't sound as big as I remembered it, but I also find it a lot more enjoyable now that I've stopped fetishising guitar-based rock like I used to. The mid-eighties generally were a much better musical period than I remembered them being.

11. Amy Winehouse: Rehab off Back to Black, 2006. You know this. You've probably heard it enough to get sick of it. I for one am not sick of it yet. After Amy Winehouse was found dead in her hotel room, one of my Facebook friends referred to it as an "unintentionally ironic anthem to denial and an unexamined life" (among other unkind words), which did not make sense to me until I realised that what he actually meant, whether he realised it or not, was that "Rehab" was a completely flawless creation: a work of art so perfect that all the self-observation, self-reflection, and self-interrogation that went into making it have become invisible. What a compliment to pay to an artist on the occasion of her death! The song also has a good beat to it.

(This was written over the course of an afternoon inbetween doing about 500 other things, because there are two people in the house who are sick and neither of them is me. Perhaps I'm better off posting vids to Facebook/Waffle in drips and drabs like that Facebook friend does)

Wow by Liza Lee is a jazzy cover of the Kate Bush classic from Lionheart. I like it, right until the point where the chorus starts; Lee's interpretation of the chorus lacks expression and sounds rushed. It's like she was at home with the verses but did not know what to do with the choruses. I still bought it off iTunes, as a) it's interesting; and b) part the proceeds of the record it's on, Anima, go to charity. Lee, who had a stroke at an early age, is dedicating the record to stroke research.

Running Up That Hill by Kevin Slick was one of my favourite versions of 'Running Up That Hill' when I started the series, and I was very disappointed that I couldn't find it on YouTube. After hearing too many stripped down versions of 'Running up That Hill', I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it anymore, but it's still a nice version for those long, hot, lazy summer nights where you also dig out the Fleet Foxes albums.

Now to find the Danielle French version somewhere. That still is a solid favorite.

Tracks from "The Blooming Hour" by JennaNicholls Link to the full collection of three songs on Soundcloud, no download

'Be Kind to My Mistakes' is a bit of a rarity now. It was originally part of the soundtrack for the Nicholas Roeg film Castaway which has not been commercially available for years and has never had a DVD release, to the best of my knowledge. It was included in the boxed set This Woman's Work, which has not been commercially available for years, but can be found on the used record market and through the Bittorrents. Though recorded after the release of Hounds of Love, it was tacked on to the 1997 reissue of that album as a bonus track, but that version is also no longer currently available. The current Fish People reissue of Hounds of Love has no bonus tracks. For the purpose of keeping score, the cover version is tagged as a song from This Woman's Work.