The Kora brothers do their thing

Bobbie, Jake and I took Juliet and Louise to go and see New Zealand funk/reggae/rock band Kora last night, so named because that’s the surname of the four brothers in the band (and there’s also one “token white dude from Wainuiomata” who played bass and keyboards).

They were stormingly good. Everyone played pretty much every instrument. Almost everyone was a lead vocalist. The technical skill and polish was astonishing, and when they brought the funk, it was Parliament heavy.

Small crowd of really enthusiastic punters, and the guys put on an amazing show. I’d heard they were good live, but they were even better than I was expecting. All of the highlights from the album with a few really extended grooves and a drum and bass workout for good measure.

They finished the set with ‘Flow’ - which I managed to capture on video (and it turned out better than I’d hoped):

An encore was obligatory, and they didn’t disappoint.

Two support acts. Beatboxer and ‘live-looper’ Red was pretty astonishingly good. The Tivoli were sort of generic. It’s fine to sound like another band, of course. They sounded like an entire category of music. No distinguishing features.

But all in all, an awesome night. Shame there were only about 30 people there to see it. Next time - go.

Hard at work

Professor Tim Wall and I quite often write together. Usually, I’ll go to his house - a good hour’s journey on two buses, plus waiting and walking. All up, 3 hours commuting, interspersed with cups of coffee, long and interesting chats about lofty-minded things, and short bursts of typing.

Working that way, we tend to get at best about 4 hours of actual writing done in a day, what with a break for lunch and everything.

We’re working on something together at the moment, so this time I suggested that rather than sit in the same room together, we use Skype video, document sharing and various other bits of online trickery, and see if we can’t get some work done that way.

Apart from some wireless router glitching I’m experiencing, it worked absolutely brilliantly. We were able to work together just as well, I got to have a bit of a lie-in, we could see each other while we worked (normally, facing our respective computers means we are in the same room together, but not face to face) and in some respects, it was a better experience all round.

My plan is to roll this out more generally so that I never have to go to work.

I blogged here a couple of days ago that I’ve started a blog for the book I’m writing. I chose the name ‘Now We Are Different’ and added it to the list of blogs I’m running at Wordpress.com.

These are not the blogs that I host myself, just those scrap-booky ones where I throw stuff for temporary projects or things that just have no budget attached to them whatsoever.

But I wasn’t delighted at having the overly long domain http://nowwearedifferent.wordpress.com - which is what you end up with when you have a free account.

But there’s a new thing: domain mapping.

For the about £5 (the cost of the domain again) you can set up domain mapping on a Wordpress.com blog (once you have that name registered of course). So now, without the usual expense of getting hosting sorted out, I can have http://nowwearedifferent.com. And I do.

Quite pleased with that. Now I just need a decent banner - and some content.

New Music Strategies has been offline for some days now. I’m having difficulty getting the internet to believe that it’s back where it should be, and that it should stop redirecting to New Music Management - a handy holding spot where it resided temporarily while I did The Big Server Migration of 2008.

Not that I think it’s particularly important in the grand scheme of things, nor am I twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to come back on so that I have something to do… but there are people who read it, and some of them are starting to notice its continued absence.

Took me ages to build up to 700 visitors a day and over 2,500 RSS subscribers. Hoping I haven’t lost too much of that in the meantime - but there’s pretty much nothing I can do except wait for support people to get back to me with more information.