The Listening Club - 9th March 2014

Hello to you all...

Commencing LC intro checklist: Heartfelt best wishes to the assembled? check. General bonhomie? check. Lighthearted comment about recent good weather and it's effect on the writer's locale and general sense of well-being? triple-check. Additional info about fine gigs attended, satisfactory amounts of good food & alcohol consumed etc? check, check, check. AOB? Damn fine new haircut check and large amount of fresh cream cake in the fridge check. Boffo! Level up!...

Last week, in my own absentia, @eastvanhalen shook the collective speakers with Redd Kross's 1993 opus "Phaseshifter" - seemed like a mixed response from the assembled, but top notch banter ensued, which is grand to see. Thanks to Steph for the selection, and for flipping the frisb across to housewives favourite @jimmmccauley, who has been having an interesting time sorting stuff out - over to Jim for the major explanations...

"Brilliantly, this time around I already knew what my pick was going to be. It's something that I'd nearly chosen for my first go, but that I'd rejected because back then we tried to keep things under an hour, and this is a little over. It's from a label that's been here before; in fact on that occasion I'd pondered if it was a new album from this lot that I somehow hadn't heard about. It wasn't, but it was in a similar ballpark. It's brought to you by the letters D, M and T. Bring your dancing shoes, bring a nice cushion, and bring fractals.

And that's where my easy, not-actually-worrying-much-about-my-pick week went wrong. Why not, I figured, do some accompanying visuals? The short answer is that it would require a lot of dicking around with screen capture software, streaming services, bitrates and so on, and would ruin about three nights' sleep in a row due to thinking of stuff late in the evening, trying it out and jamming my brain into the fastest setting for a bit. I am an idiot.

Despite the clear idiocy, this week I'm going to try streaming some live visuals to go with the mystery LP. If it doesn't all go wrong they'll be at http://www.twitch.tv/jimmccauley and they should mostly look quite nice, if a little low-res and glitchy at times. Streaming isn't very kind to the sort of thing I'll be generating, but I think I've tweaked the settings into something I'll probably get away with. One way or another it should be fun.

Enjoy!

UPDATE

I think I've managed to get this into the sweetest spot I can, but I'm still pushing it. At worst this'll be a pretty heroic failure :D

ANYWAY, some tips for niceness:

1: Have enough internets: I'm uploading at 3.5Mbps and Twitch.tv just lobs it straight out the other end, so if you have a reliable 4Mpbs down then it should be fine.

2: Use the pop-out option on the video player, then stretch it to about 800x600 (or more if it looks nice, but that's the res I'm runing Neon at).

3: Start streaming before 8 - because it'll show you an advert (plus another in the pop-out window if you use that). I'll be up and running before that anyway.

4: Try the Twitch.TV iPad app and search for jimmccauley on that. Its search is a bit flakey but the video comes out really nicely.

5: Don't go into a trance.


Hooray! Seeya later!

PS Bear in mind I won't be streaming the audio, because it'll eat bandwidth and sound like shit!"

All rightey! Download is here, and the Mixcloud stream (which may reveal the track titles, you have been warned)  is here!

Search #listeningclub to see what's going on, and follow @listeningclub for the admin.

Hope to see you tonight at 8pm GMT!