I spent Monday night at LRUG, watching three interesting talks and enjoying a few beers afterwards.

I didn’t sleep well on Monday or Tuesday nights, but with a combination of a nap and excitement, I made it up to Islington to see Derya Yıldırım and Grup Şimşek at the Assembly Hall for their style of Anatolian folk/psychedelic rock.

There were a lot of Turkish fans in the audience, as was obvious as soon as she said “çok mutluyuz …” (we’re very happy) and the hall erupted in a roar of approval.

Musicians on stage playing, respectively, guitar, saz, and keyboards. There's a drummer behind.

Grup Şimşek

It was a great gig – beautiful singing, excellent musicianship, and captivating grooves – and I enjoyed it despite my fatigue; in fact, I almost completely forgot that I was tired until I got home.

The most musically impressive moment was when the guitarist put down his guitar halfway through the song, picked up a cold flute, and launched straight into a solo.

It surprises me when I encounter a system that doesn’t use Unicode these days, but event ticketing is obviously one place that hasn’t yet fully accepted the Good News. The whole process was full of different encoding errors, culminating in paper tickets with “DERYA Y€LD€R€M” on them. I’m also not a fan of the brinksmanship of sending tickets by post a few days before the gig, especially in a time of postal strikes, but it worked out OK.

I didn’t sleep well on Wednesday night either, and I spent Thursday in a state of extreme torpor. I tried to make a cup of coffee but struggled to carry out the operations required in the correct order, because I was exhausted, because I hadn’t slept properly since at least the weekend, which was … why I needed that cup of coffee.

I finally got a proper night of sleep on Thursday night. I have felt a lot better since then.

I recorded a track for Disquiet Junto 0568: Create a piece of music that begins with the hallmarks of a nightmare and then gradually transforms into a more positive piece through the use of piano chord C6/9.

I had a concept in my head that I wanted a load of dissonant sounds to resolve gradually and almost imperceptibly into a relaxing sound over a few minutes, and that that was something that needed automation, so I fired up Sonic Pi. And that didn’t work any more, because I had updated Ubuntu since last time I used it, so I recompiled it, and that didn’t work because it had more dependencies now, but after reading a few GitHub issues I finally got that to work, and then I was able to try and implement it!

It plays random notes from the chord at various octaves for approximately three minutes. At first, the notes are randomly shifted by up to three semitones, making them wildly dissonant. Over a minute, that shift is scaled down to zero. Over slightly longer periods, the cutoff frequency is gradually reduced, making the tone mellower, and the interval between notes increased. Here’s the source code.

It’s amazing how little temperature tells you about comfort. It was 18.5 C in our living room the other day. I was shivering in three layers and thinking about putting on a hat. In summer I’d be happy in shorts at that temperature.

A weird website for you: Floor796