Author Archives: Tim Hall

IQ – Dark Matter

Posted on July 25, 2004 by Tim Hall

Unlike their contemporaries Marillion, IQ have never moved their sound very far away from the 80s British neo-prog template of Gabriel-era Genesis crossed with mid-70s Pink Floyd. What makes them worth a listen is Peter Nicholls’ distinctive melodies, and the fact that while what they do isn’t terribly original, they do it very well indeed.

Dark Matter, the band’s eighth studio album, doesn’t really break any new ground, merely honing their sound to near perfection. On first listening, it has the feel of their early albums, a sound dominated by layers of swirling keyboards and guitar topped by Nicholl’s vaguely menacing vocals and darkly obscure lyrics. What’s improved from their early work is far better arrangements that leave some of their older material sounding vaguely half-formed by comparison.

Keyboardist Martin Orford shines on this album right from the very beginning, the synthesised orchestral intro that heralds the 11 minute opener “Sacred Sound”, and the dramatic church organ in the middle section. If that wasn’t enough it follows straight into swirling mellotron backing the guitar solo. Then there’s the wonderful organ work on the ballad “Red Dust Shadow”.

Meanwhile, the more aggressive “You Never Will” is Peter Nicholls at his darkest.

Now as the shadows fall on Allhallows Eve
We spin our tangled web, learn to deceive
I keep on hoping that you’ll do something real
Give in to influence but you never will

“Born Brilliant” instrumentation recalls Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine”, but the lyrics are something else. It’s a matter of opinion who they’re supposed to be about.

My catalogue of failures
Is etched upon my lips
The baggage that I carry
Would sink a thousand ships
My motives are uncertain
Intentions not altogether pure
So don’t you want me beside you
Just like it was before

The album closes with the 24 minute epic “Harvest of Souls”. Even though some of the instrumentation sounds just a little too like “Foxtrot” era Genesis for their own good, it’s still is the standout song of the album, a perfectly structured six-part epic. Each section flows seamlessly into the next, and contains some of Nicholl’s best melodies. There’s one short instrumental passage that’s is such a direct lift from the “Apocalypse 9/8″ section of “Supper’s Ready” I’m sure it’s a deliberate quotation.

This is an album that gets better and better with each listen. On the first couple of listens it was clearly a vast improvement on the slightly disappointing predecessor “Seventh House”. After a few more spins I’m beginning to think this might just be the best album IQ have ever made.

Posted in Music, Record Reviews | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Dreamlyrics

Posted on July 24, 2004 by Tim Hall

DreamLyrics has an all-new look!

DreamLyrics is a friendly online message gaming community dedicated to role-playing gamers, where new members are made welcome. The site is mainly focused on role-playing via message games, though we do have a live chat room and our own RPG ezine, DreamScribe in addition to other tabletop games.

Check out the two games I run, Arrhan Empire Frontiers and Kalyr. The latter is the other half of the game I run on The Phoenyx.

This independent site is active and well organized, run by gamers for gamers. In fact we have several published authors, including those who have written role-playing books for GURPS and In Nomine. The bulletin board has been running since May 2000. A small charge is made for annual membership to cover running costs and to ensure continuity.

If you’re into message board or PBeM style gaming, you should take a look at this site. Most of the message boards are viewable by all, but read-only for non-members.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

Turkish Rail Tragedy

Posted on July 22, 2004 by Tim Hall

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Turkish train crash ‘kills 128′

A Turkish government official says at least 128 people have been killed after a high-speed train derailed.

Health Ministry Undersecretary Nejdet Unuvar said that another 57 people were injured in the derailment.

“The scene is one of carnage… There are people lying all over the place,” journalist Oguz Dizer was quoted as telling NTV television.

A number of carriages were overturned, but it was not immediately clear what caused the train to leave the tracks.

Reports say the train had 230 people on board, so 128 dead would be more than half the passengers on the train, which if true is a major tragedy.

From the pictures of the TV news, I have to say I’m somewhat skeptical about the reported death toll. It’s common for initial estimates of the number of deaths on major train accidents to be revised downwards as the wreckage is searched and people are accounted for. Let’s hope and pray that’s true for this crash.

The pictures showed showed several modern carriages lying at various angles, but largely intact. The damage shown didn’t seem serious enough for the sort of death toll being talked about. Of course, I may be completely wrong; presumably a clearer picture will emerge tomorrow morning.

Update:. The Turkish authorities have revised the death toll down to 38. Still bad, though.

Posted in Railways | Comments Off

Fish says “Keep the TPOs!”

Posted on July 22, 2004 by Tim Hall

In this interview with Fish with a Dutch prog website, he’s clearly in favour of trains of windowless red coaches hauled by class 67s

And there are people depending on the mail, and the mail is not cheap…And with the prices, the service is absolutely [rude word deleted]despicable. So we are now taking legal advice and we’re also going to the BBC on a Watchdog program, because we got fans who complain to us about how long it takes for their [rude word deleted] CD to arrive in the mail.

We’ve sent test packages out to places and seeing just how long it would take to get there.

And the thing is, the Royal Mail, they are now going to take the night train off. We used to have the famous night train. And it was this train from London, and it was this train that goes down with all the packages and the post and stuff. And they take it off because we don’t need it anymore.
THEY [Another Rude Word deleted] NEED IT NOW MORE THAN [the same word deleted again] ANY OTHER TIME – [Insulting sexual reference]!!

The whole interview is well worth reading. The piscine one is not happy with the current state of the music business.

Posted in Music, Railways | Comments Off

The Great Neocon Riots!

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Tim Hall

I think Scott would appreciate this one!

Neocon Riots Rock DC

Large areas of the nation’s capital were in ruins as violent protests continued for the third day against a bill that would revive the military draft, but only for neoconservatives.

The bill, officially called the Bellicose Resources Deployment Act but informally known as the Roast Chickenhawk Initiative, would supplement the nation’s dwindling supplies of mindless belligerence by drawing on inexhaustible deposits found in seething think tanks, frothing newspaper columns, fulminating talk-radio programs, frenzied Sunday morning television and publications owned by Australians. It would then be shipped to the Middle East, where it is urgently needed.

If only… Read the whole thing, as the saying goes. (Link from The Light of Reason)

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Game Dream 5: Cooperative Storytelling

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Tim Hall

Doc’s Game Dream is the successor to Game WISH. I’ve got some catching up to do on this one, it’s already got up to Game Dream 5, which asks:

To what level (if any) do the groups you usually play with encourage communal creation of the game world? Are the players spectators, or do they actually have a say in the plot (moreso that just guiding it by the actions of their characters)?

The two online games I run (with many of same players) are very different in this regard. Kalyr is very much a labour of love, something I’ve spent fifteen years developing, with reams of backstory, politics, culture and religion. It’s also a world with a lot of deep mysteries, and one of the themes of the game is about the players finding out the truth behind the various cults and guilds. Because so much of the world is predefined, there’s not much space for the players themselves to add much more than local colour; I compensate for this by giving the players a lot of plot freedom.

The second game, Ahrran Empire Frontiers is a very different beast. It’s a space opera game I inherited from another GM, with a big universe for which very little is predefined. Since I’m more or less making up the whole thing as I go along, there’s no good reason why I can’t let the players do some of the work. Some of the planets, such as “Esturia” and “The Scouse Cluster” came from one of the players in an online chat. The whole concept of “exchange” comes from an in-character post from another very creative player. I see my job as GM as trying to keep the whole thing coherent and providing some overall direction.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

The Test of Time

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Tim Hall

Ah, the eternal popular culture vs. High Art argument. To this ridiculous piece of fogeyish drivel, Uncertain Principles has this response:

The only distinction I really see between most “high culture” music and the pop that people sneer at is what you might call the “Agyar Criterion,” after the narrator in Steven Brust’s Agyar, who responds to questions about the quality of art by saying “ask me again in fifty years.” The main thing distinguishing pop music from classical music is age, and the filtering that comes with age.

I’m not going to attempt to claim that all pop music is the equal of Mozart– the occasional channel-surf past MTV would make clear that that’s a foolish idea. Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of Everything is Crud”) applies to music as well as literature. 90% of what people listen to these days is total garbage, but 90% of what people listened to in Mozart’s day was also total garbage. It’s just that nobody remembers the garbage from back

The thing about taste in music is that it’s very personal and quite subjective; I think your appreciation of a particular piece of music is strongly influence by whatever other music you’ve heard. If you only ever listen to opera, or heavy metal, or jazz, or top 40 pop or whatever, it’s going to be more difficult to appreciate something from a quite different musical genre. But that doesn’t mean that any one musical genre is inherently superior. I take exception to those people, either classical snobs or pseudo-intellectual rock journalists, who insist that their tastes in music are not subjective opinions, but objective truth, and anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

As an aside, and at the possible risk of contradicting myself, I wonder if some of the classical-is-good, popular-is-bad attitude comes from the apparent fact that the first half of the 20th century seemed to be lean times for popular music. Judging by the relatively few popular songs from that era that have passed the test of time compared with those from the 50s and 60s (which is still long enough ago for the test of time factor to come into play).

I wonder. In the year 2100, which of the following is most likely to be revered as a great composer of the late 20th century?

  • Harrison Birtwhisle
  • Andrew Lloyd-Weber
  • Roger Waters
  • Pete Waterman

At the moment, I think we have no way of knowing.

Posted in Music | 1 Comment

The Colour Illuminati

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Tim Hall

Making Light tells us of the sekrit conspiracy that decides what colours domestic appliances and clothes will be each year. Yes, there really is a cabal that meets and decides that beige will be the new black (actually, grey is the new black, this year). They also come up with the ridiculous marketspeak names for them.

These are the official colours for “Transportation and Related”:

Tusk-Ivory influences aluminum reflecting the global warming of silver.

Acier-Sounds like French, but this steely gray is really from Pittsburgh, and has universal appeal. It is an expansion of the cool metals.

Aloeminium-The healing power of aloe combines with aluminum.

Mystic Quartz-A purple whisper adds mystery to silver; mature, technical and genderless.

Broadway Bronze-This dark and murky complex neutral is pulled from the streets of the concrete jungle.

Peace-A unifying global blue represents peace on earth.

But do One Anglia know about them?

Posted in Memes | 1 Comment

July Dreamscribe

Posted on July 18, 2004 by Tim Hall

Actually been up a couple of weeks now. There’s a bit more meat in the July issue, most notably Amadán‘s article on Online GM Tips. There’s also Pit Fiend’s overview of Paranoia, one of those games I’ve always wanted to play but never got round to. And there are some thoughts of mine in the member survey.

I still don’t like the layout and navigation; some of my comments do appear in letters to the editor.

Posted in Games | Comments Off

Times of Transition

Posted on July 13, 2004 by Tim Hall

On the subject of British trains, and the modelling potential thereof, Electric Nose talks of times of transition.

Contrary to popular opinion, I firmly believe we’ve just lived through one of the most interesting and modellable transition eras in the history of diesel and electric traction. The influx of new GM motive power has sat alongside an ample selection of old favourites. New super-wagons have rubbed shoulders with the staple fare of previous generations, such as 4 wheel tanks and MGR hoppers. A bewildering array of modern multiple units are only just ousting the vestiges of their first generation ancestors. Liveries in particular are at their peak, from the point of view of variety – I’ve always been enamoured of the juxtaposition of Virgin and Intercity Swallow colours on the WCML, and the celebrity repaint trend has enhanced things further.

Sometimes you don’t recognise a golden age until you’re nearing the end of it. I wonder if we’re ever going to see anything approaching the bewildering variety of liveries again. On my recent trip to Dawlish I saw class 158 DMUs in no fewer than eight different colour schemes (and that’s just two train operating companies!). 158s were once the most boring units on the network. And then there was the sight of an EWS class 67 hauling a long train of elderly Mk2 coaches in the old BR Intercity colours on a summer Saturday extra; surely the present-day equivalent of a shiny new diesel hauling elderly ‘big four’ coaches in the sixties. Not to mention the 40+ year old class 31 diesel I saw at Bristol on the way home painted in Wessex Trains pink.

Oh, and best wishes to Electric Nose in taking up the hotseat again as moderator for Demodellers.

Posted in Railways | 6 Comments