Winter has arrived in Melbourne. To me that means short days, falling leaves, and the occasional smell of a wood stove across the city at night. It can be easy at this time of year to withdraw a little bit, to bunker down and count the days off until warmer weather returns.
Of course winter here means summer somewhere else. As is the case with many things, where one is experiencing the sunset, another is experiencing the sunrise. Nothing lasts forever, and we all get only as long as we get. Soon enough the winds change, the cycle repeats and things begin anew.
This is Episode 104 of Music For Small Audiences. It was recorded on a lovely winter evening in warm surrounds.
Coordinating travel, as with coordinating a lot of things these days, involves a lot of time waiting on hold on the telephone. As such, I am becoming something of a hold music aficionado. On many recent calls the music has been punctuated with a repetitive series of apologies explaining that, due to the pandemic, hold times are longer than they might otherwise be. If the past two years have taught me anything, it is the extent to which a pandemic involves an awful lot of waiting, and more than a few apologies.
For more than two years, it has felt that relationships with friends and family overseas have been on hold. As such it was great to reconnect during a recent return trip to Canada, and to spend some quality time with loved ones. While telephone and video connections are valuable, they do not fully replace the magic of real human connection.
As I grew up my two older sisters were a constant source of musical guidance and inspiration, taking me to concerts, bringing me records from overseas school trips and keeping me up to speed on the hottest bands across the genre that was then called New Wave. Throughout our early years growing up in suburban Toronto, one radio station in particular was held high as the mythical point source from which all good music came. That station was CFNY, 102.1 FM.
Following on from high school some years later, I managed to convince a local synthesizer shop to give me a job in sales. The shop owner became a dear friend, and the shop was quite popular with local dance music makers, in part because of the owners incredible collection of vintage synths. Channeling my paternally inherited passion for all things beeping and flashing, I got quite into learning every bit of gear I could get my hands on, with my mother eternally patient while an endless parade of boxes, wires and devices began to take over more and more rooms of our house.
As luck would have it, one day the Roland product rep called, asking if I could demo their new DJ oriented stereo sampler to one of CFNYs on air crew, by bringing it to demo live on air during their midnight to 6AM weekend dance music broadcasts. At a time when the Toronto rave scene was exploding and so many new genres emerging, there was no shortage of amazing music to be played each week. To make a long story short the experience up close was eye opening. In the process I learned a lot about how to build and shape a six hour set through the wee hours to sunrise.
This is episode 102 of Music For Small Audiences. A suitably extended set, it reflects to me the free spirit and genre exploration of those all night radio broadcast sets thirty years ago.
Ah yes, life in a pandemic. I suppose every now and then life throws up a bit of turbulence, and so this is our time. But what is the difference between flying and falling, really? There are some parallels shared with the difference between drowning and waving. Beyond that, falling also carries with it a sense of inevitability, of a ballistic trajectory, of a future impact. No wonder that dreams of falling are so common, or so confronting.
At a time when friends and family can feel so very far away, and as humanity fights a pitched battle with the everchanging swathe of infectious agents that seem so determined to further postpone our return to normality, who knows what lies ahead, or what comes next? Sometimes the best one can hope for is a soft landing.
As I write this I am just over three hundred kilometres from home. May not sound like much, but after an extended pandemic and all of the restrictions that come with, even a little bit of travel is a really big deal.
The past few weeks have been a reawakening of sorts. Social reconnections, the relaxation of restrictions, and a new sense of freedom and possibility for space and place. Seeing old friends in person again. Travelling to the places that we had always meant to see. Revisiting the places that we have been away from for far too long. Meeting new people. Booking overseas travel, and planning new adventures abroad. Hard to believe this is the furthest I have been from home in more than two years.
This is of course episode 100 of Music For Small Audiences. It was recorded in one take a few weeks ago on the first weekend of social reconnection after many months apart. A special double length set filled with sparkling musical gems, it celebrates both the recent reconnections with friends and family close by, and the promise of seeing again those who we have been away from for far too long.
As befits the context, it has more than a few nods to musical memories of years gone by. As a mix it is a fairly stretched out, groove driven affair, perfect for popping onto the hifi in the background while reconnecting with your own friends and family.
Whether we are talking about social gatherings or impending natural disasters, there comes a point at which leaving is no longer an option. A point when, to paraphrase an old movie quote, there can be no turning back, and there is no choice but to ride it out.
Whether bunkering down or busting a move, once the decision to stay is made, the die has been cast. Once those present have made the commitment to stick it out and see where it all ends up, there is a bit of peace provided, because there is no longer a decision to be made. One way or another, things are in motion. Batten down the hatches and settle in, as the end game is underway.
So too it has been with the Australian response to the pandemic. In recent weeks the strategy has shifted from one of elimination to one of accommodation, with the assumption that anyone still in Australia was going to have to make peace with things washing through to a certain extent. In hearing the announced shift in strategy, and in reading the emotions of those communicating it, there felt somewhat a parallel with that pivot point in natural disaster emergency broadcasts where the messaging shifts from strongly encouraging immediate evacuation, to advising that evacuation was no longer possible and that come what may, the only option remaining was to shelter in place.
This mix was recorded during the time of this strategic shift. As such it reflects equal parts encouragement, relief and nostalgia, and is well suited to settling into a well protected place for an extended start to finish listen.
I love a good World War II documentary. While the world is today a very different place, there is still so much from that era that rings true, including the misplaced optimism in 1939 that suggested ‘the boys will be home by Christmas’. Similarly, when the global pandemic started here in the twenty-first century, there was a sense that things would return to normal within some reasonable period of time. And yet, here we are.
As children in the back seat during road trips of interminable length – as they all were – we would too often and too soon ask the adults in charge ‘are we there yet?’. To the extent there are adults in charge of getting us to the end point of this interminable worldwide trip, those adults are in the laboratories, in the manufacturing facilities, and in the supply chains supporting the design and delivery of our global vaccine program.
Waiting for time to pass is difficult. As anyone who has ever sat on the tarmac waiting for takeoff for longer than expected will tell you, it is doubly difficult when we are not quite sure how long we are meant to wait for. From Blaise Pascal’s timeless observation that humanity’s inability to sit quietly is the root of its collective misfortune, to the painful existential grind of Samuel Beckett’s no-show Godot, it seems at times that the only thing worse than a deadline is no deadline.
For all these reasons and so many more, it sure was nice to get my second shot. This mix was recorded the evening following. As befits the mood of the evening, it touches a few different nerves of past, present and future.
It is the start of the longest night of the year here in Melbourne as I write this.
As you may infer from the titles of my podcast episodes over the years, I have a recurring interest in the pivot points, the transitions, the turning points, the fulcrums, the thresholds, the apexes, the zeniths and the nadirs, and the point at which ebb becomes flow.
Raised as I was with equal-tempered reverence for astronomy and astrology, the solstices hold a particular mystique for me. For many years, I took to playing the classic James Holden track Solstice on the summer and winter solstices. Close listeners will no doubt have heard the tune sneaking its way into the closing minutes of MFSA094 recorded a few months ago (admittedly closer to the equinox).
Perhaps my fascination with turning points comes from some innate need for stimulation, change or newness. Perhaps it is a natural fascination with contrast, and the sense of fresh and different that comes from taking a new direction. Whatever its origins, I have learned to embrace it.
This mix is a three hour set filled with plenty of changes in flow and tack. It was recorded live on a cozy Saturday winter evening just a few days shy of the winter solstice, in patient anticipation of the sunshine and spring soon to return to the southern hemisphere.
I am not a fast runner, but I like to run. After so many cancelled events it was great to again run in an organised event last weekend. It was a road run along the Great Ocean Road on the southern coast of Australia. The weather was wet but not rainy, with the run highlighted by an improbable number of seaside rainbows. Fittingly, the pub in which I had my celebratory post run beer bills itself as the southernmost pub on the Australian mainland.
Running long distances has a way of letting the mind run free, safe in the knowledge that nothing can be actioned, and that we are exactly where we need to be. For a longer run there is also this balance to be struck, between pushing hard enough to chase a personal best, while also keeping enough in the tank to make it through to the finish line and the shower and pub beyond. While I firmly believe that pushing oneself is the best way to get good enough to make things easy, I also feel it is important not to beat oneself up too much. One can only do what one can do.
I am fortunate enough to know some exceptionally hard workers. In getting to know them it has been refreshing and inspiring to learn that those that push themselves the hardest are often also those most adept at loosening up and letting things go when the finish line has been crossed, the project has been sorted, the deliverable has been sent, and the deal has been done. At the risk of repeating myself, balance is key.
While the whole world may be going through a global pandemic, the experience of every country and every individual has been different. As my good friend Dan has put it, we may all be riding out the same storm, but we are definitely not all in the same boat. We have each had our own unique difficulties and quiet victories over the course of the past year, and we have each found our own way of coping with the circumstances that have been thrown at us.
For me, keeping things on an even keel over the past twelve months meant making quite a few suboptimal dietary choices, with the collective result leading to a recent reckoning as I now confront the reality of having to fit back into my work suits and shirts. As I assess the consequences of the last year and develop a course of behaviour to right the ship, I am struck again by the importance of balancing hedonic and eudaimonic priorities. Bad food feels good, but so too does being healthy.
Fun means different things to different people. An activity that one person sees as an exciting adventure – say free solo rock climbing, slam poetry or building a ship in a bottle – another is just as likely to see as profoundly terrifying, unpleasantly fiddly, or excruciatingly boring, with each the others nightmare. The extent to which a given commitment is seen as an opportunity or an obligation is really just a function of perspective, appetite and appreciation. Even the most arduous journey or pedantic detour can be seen as an odyssey or rite of passage with a strong enough rose tinting to the glasses.
I am reading a book in which the author suggests that success in life is driven in part by the extent to which we are able to make peace with boredom, and to stay engaged with a habit, task or body of work even when our interest level wanes. The author suggests that the mark of whether you are made for a task is not just whether you love it, but rather whether you can handle the unpleasant parts of the task more easily than most people. Find a task that you enjoy that others complain about, he suggests, and you will have found an activity worth focusing on as a hobby or vocation.
This mix was recorded live a few weeks ago. It starts and ends with two lovely bits of vinyl I recently picked up, and has some very groovy tunes mixed in from start to finish. I hope you enjoy it.
While the events of the past twelve months have provided plenty of reasons to be pensive, persnickety and petulant, I am feeling optimistic and inspired at the moment. It has been a year of limitations, worries, uncertainty and introspection, but as the calendar year ticks over and we try to imagine a new post-pandemic normal, I cannot help but feel a sense of optimism for what urban professional living and working will look like if and when we get to the other side of all of this.
As a white collar office worker – a knowledge worker, as Peter Drucker would describe me – I need to be near a computer and a telephone to do my job. In the before times, this meant long days in the city, and daily commuting from home to work and back again. I guess I had always accepted that the price of full time employment was daily tripping to the city and back. But 2020, and the hundred day hard lockdown that Melbourne endured in the name of ensuring a public health victory, rewrote a lot of these rules by proving what was possible.
Reconnecting with my colleagues at work over the past few weeks, we have had some boundary-pushing discussions about what work really needs to look like, and what our future workplace can be as a result of all of this. Rather than going back to work as we knew it, we may well be going somewhere new, where work is less about where you are, and more about what you do. As a circadian slave often energised at weird hours, the idea of being able to fully flex both time and space is truly mind expanding. Here is hoping the adventurous vision holds.
I enjoy long distance running with good music as a physical and psychological release. In particular I like the out-and-back style run, heading out to a distant point and then turning around to head home. Running out, there is a sense of adventure and commitment, knowing that every km out is a km that will need to be covered again on the way back home. More often than I should probably admit, I make a bit of a banking airplane figure with outstretched hands and some verbal sound effects as I make the turnaround. As the way out becomes the way in, the mindset shifts, from exploration to recovery.
There is of course a global pandemic raging. It has been going on for a while now. With the reintroduction of community transmission here in Victoria just announced as I write this, we are clearly nowhere near the end, or even anywhere near the beginning of the end. However, with multiple vaccines approved and in the process of being deployed, my hope is that we are at least coming to the end of the beginning. With any luck we are turning the corner for the return trip home to some semblance of normalcy, even as we accept that things on our return may not be how we left them.
In audio editing terms, normalisation is something you do to a recorded signal in order to proportionally recalibrate it, so that the loudest peak in the program material corresponds to the highest signal intensity possible without distortion. You do not actually lose anything in the process. It is just that the levels are reset to a new standard.
With our very last active COVID case here in Victoria given a clean bill of health and released from the hospital this morning, the second wave of the pandemic has now completely subsided in Australia. As the freedoms return, we are performing a similar reset. It is a recalibration towards a new normal, a reconsideration of what the best and worst case scenarios are, a relook at what we can reasonably roll with, and a rethink as to what our acceptable maximums and minimums really are going to be across a range of different variables at the end of all of this. Having seen through a challenging winter, we are now preparing for a cautious southern summer of comparative freedom and warmth.
Have we normalised the impossible, or merely the incredibly difficult? Without the benefit of hindsight it is hard to say. What I do know is that all around the world, every country, every city, every family is at their own point of the pendulum that seems to endlessly swing between triumph and disaster. Each is doing the best they can with the knowledge and beliefs they have, each finding their own path towards their own new understanding of normal.
Early November 2020. Not quite summer in Melbourne, but certainly not winter. Yesterday I wore a scarf over my sunburn.
We are not quite free of restrictions here, but certainly not as held back either. We have spent more quality time with friends over the past week than we did during the six months prior, but while things are improving they are far from normal. There are still no jet planes in the sky.
The counting of votes from an American election has been going on for a number of days, with no clear result quite at the moment.
In time, all of these things will come to resolution.
It is the start of the longest night of the year here in Melbourne as I write this.
