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The Mire

You can't get with Mr Smith

Sometimes the development of music technology is quite breathtaking – think of Final Scratch, Ableton Live, all those real-time scratch and processing programmes. Microsoft's Songsmith falls way, way, way, outside this category, to such a degree it's quite astonishing. A programme designed so you can just sing into a microphone, and it'll pick up the melodies and concoct an appropriate backing you. The results are, without exception, jawdroppingly , side-splittingly appalling . You can pretty much hear the mix of rigid, codified algorithms (switching between simple chord progressions where the voice allows) and random melodic detours (just to keep things moving along). Essentially, they've managed the perfect simulation of a hotel bar band desperately vamping along when they've got no idea where the tune is going. A reminder that, in these days of fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, computer software can still sound astonishingly luddite.

The Mire

Funky on Rinse FM

Like many, I've been warming to Funky, the [rather weirdly named] new thing on London Pirate Radio stations like Rinse FM . Perhaps we'll warm to the name itself after a while; 'funky house', the label which used to be listed on flyers plastered on lamp posts for over-25s raves all over the M25 Orbital area, suggested an attempt to organify house, to give it a certain feng-shui'd, ergonomic ease of use. Funky, though, is significantly different, and it's understandable that the second part of the moniker has been dropped. So 'Funky; will do for now. Of course, 'Grime' sounded weird to start with, but now perfectly captures the cold-concrete intensity of the music. Listening to Rinse FM sets by Fingerprint and Marcus Nasty, the elements of soca and dancehall are pretty subtle, but are such an essential ingredient. It's often moving against the 4/4 beat, generating that push and pull feel which gives it a feeling of democracy, somehow (ie, you...

The Mire

Ready for the breakdown

A study reported in The Guardian , suggesting an inverse relationship between complexity in pop and fluctuations in the stock market ( "Beyoncé's new single spells economic doom" ) is the kind of thing that gives studying pop music a bad name. Apparently, Phil Maymin, New York University's professor of finance and risk engineering (the job title is intriguingly vague whether he's pro or anti risk) suggests that the prevalence of singles with "low 'beat variance'" often coincides with the stock market being due for a fall. The most obvious flaw in this is that Beyonce's new single is actually, in a post-Timbaland style, actually pretty sophisticated. There's a lurking sub-base in there, an offbeat (and atonal) keyboard lick through the verse, and a Joey Beltram style Mentasm stab in the chorus. The dance moves it demands are the kind of elliptical hip swaying of the video, not some kind of skinhead stomp. It almost makes me wonder if R&B; might...

The Mire

Rewind 2008 Addendum: The Office Dissonance

We have a high threshold for sonic extremity at The Wire. At the time of writing, someone behind me is blasting out a Puerto Rican noise group from their computer. At times in the last year or so we have - or at least I have – enjoyed field recordings of creaking bridges in Thailand , longform improvisastions for motorised vibraphones , or recordings of a ventilation propellers . Such strange sonic matter is warmly rendered through our appealingly battered old NAD amp, wired up through some arcane scheme to floorstanding speakers scattered around far-flung corners of our open office. It's rarely less than a pleasure and a privileged to sample such intense music in this environment. Sometimes, though, someone will be in middle of a phone call when the latest missive from the Michigan noise scene hits the CD deck, or be distracted from an intricate bit of last minute proofing by a 200 word-a-minute Grime MC....