Three great mixes of 2012

2012 still feels very odd to write, but it’s already the time in the year to contemplate music and what I’ve liked. Kicking off this year (and I’ll even do the other two posts) are three ace mixes of 2012. Sit back and get comfy, if you listen to this lot you’ll lose three hours. NERD WARNING: I’ve linked all three of these as Mixcloud widgets, so if you’re blocking snazzy stuff click the title links to get the mixes.

Soundhog – The Delian Mix

I’ve loved Soundhog for years. One of the most notable members of the UK bootleg scene,  if there was such a thing, his remixes and longer mixes were great (dig around his site if you’ve never heard of him). For this mix he was marking Delia Derbyshire’s 75th birthday. I’d been contemplating attempting a mix of radiophonic workshop material myself, but my half arsed efforts are nowhere near the majesty of his creation. Combining short pieces, interviews, her best known and most interesting works along with those of her collaborators this is more like a wonderful hour of audio celebrating her than just a humble mix. Anyone who claims to love old Dr Who even a little, or who likes any form of electronica should give this a listen.
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Lucky Seven

Seven months ago I got run over on the streets of London for the second time.

Last week The Times launched a cycle safety campaign. Their Save Our Cyclists campaign has garnered plenty of support from cyclists including myself. I signed up and gave them a small summary of my experiences of cycling in London. They were nice enough to ask for more and ran the following paragraph as the experiences of one Alex Ingram of Hammersmith aged 30 who commutes daily to Kew Bridge:

In the seven years that I’ve been cycling in London I’ve been run over twice. My first accident was in 2007, at a T-junction. A young mother drove out of a side road and knocked me flying into the air. I was lucky — I was only bruised. My last accident was in July, when I was run over from behind by a pair on a stolen moped at a busy gyratory in Hammersmith. I’d been scraped across the road on my right-hand side. I was rather lucky.

Lucky, you might wonder? What’s lucky about being run over twice? Well, despite suffering pretty nasty road rash (which took months to heal and has left some scars) in July and awful bruising (which only healed after a few months) a few years back I’ve not broken anything worse than a front fork, some cranks and a pair of glasses. It could have been so much worse. The page my story was printed on shared its space with those of my fellow cyclists and that of James Cracknell. They had proper accidents, the changes they experienced were not just in the mind.

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Actually, I’m the old fart on twitter

The new year came about in slightly odd style for me, confined as I was to bed with a reasonably decent hot toddy. Similarly the news that one Rupert Murdoch had joined twitter caused much consternation. Mostly I was just shocked that it either wasn’t a fake or had managed somehow to fake it’s way into being verified. The fact that it has since proven to be real has, I must say, actually given me some respect for the man. Many a senior employee in many a company would do well to engage with the future rather than rail against it.

So, when did I first join twitter? And why? Well it’s almost four and a half years ago now, or 13,639 tweets ago. My friend Ian (@maniacyak) had recently joined and had been mentioning it for some time. I was massively sceptical as to why I would use twitter when the only use I could see for it was updating my FaceBook status. I couldn’t see the use in yet another social network. Here’s my first tweet:

Boring, isn’t it? It drew comments on FaceBook and no response whatsoever on twitter. I duly followed @maniacyak back for snaring me in and then a few of my other friends joined over the coming months, but I hit a problem. I had nothing interesting to say I wouldn’t rather blog or place on FaceBook, and not enough interesting people to say it to or to read things from. I’d log on to twitter.com every so often read the few tweets that had appeared since I last logged on and then leave.
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