Rivers of London

Bokomslag Rivers of London (häftad)

I was living in London for four years, and during that time I began considering London itself as a living organism, similar to the description of the city in Peter Ackroyd’s monumental London: The Biography. These ideas also appear in Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, where the London rivers are present in a much personal manner than in most other stories I have read.

Rivers of London is a detective story, beginning when a beheaded body is found at Covent Garden. The main character in the book, Peter Grant, is a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police and he gets the task of guarding the crime scene after the body and everybody else involved in the investigation has left. Somewhat surprisingly he finds a witness to the crime lingering at the scene, and more surprisingly the witness turns out to be a ghost. It turns out that the Police has a unit for supernatural cases, and Grant is transferred to this unit under the supervision of Inspector Nightingale, who also happens to be a wizard.

I enjoyed reading this book. The setting in central London is of course one of the reasons for an Anglophile like myself to like the book, but also the relaxed language, which reminded me to some extent about the writing of Douglas Adams, made the book a pleasant read. It feels good to be able to follow many of the geographical and pop-cultural references interspersed in the text. Unfortunately, the sequences in the book that are focusing on action and suspense feel less exciting than the rest, and the habit of having cliffhangers at the end of the chapters feels constrained at times. However, the good mood and the large amount of creative ideas compensate these flaws more than enough.

This is the first in a series of novels following Peter Grant and his adventures solving crimes amongst London’s unknown inhabitants. There is a clear risk that I will read more books from this series.

Spiken i plattan


One of the limitations when making musik on the Amiga was that there were only four channels with which to work. In order to fill out the sound, a dirty trick I thought of was to make sure that each sound sample was so short that the next could follow immediately without cutting off anything from the previous sound. This song was a test if that would work in practice.

Lingonheads


How much of the original song has to be retained when making a cover version?
When I made this tune in the mid 1990s, most of the Amiga-based covers were either horribly bland or simply horrible (including my own attempts). Hence I got the idea that a cover would be better as long as the elements from the original song were kept at an absolute minimum. Following this line of thought I started from four bars of “Somewhere over the rainbow” and composed this happy little song, which I believe proved my point.

Vindsjälar

Bokomslag Vindsjälar (inbunden)

Jag läser ytterst sällan deckare, så jag blev lite överraskad när jag fick Vindsjälar av Mons Kallentoft i julklapp. Dessutom har jag nu efteråt förstått att boken är den sjunde i en serie böcker om Malin Fors och hennes kollegor i Linköpingspolisen, så den här stackars boken verkade ha hamnat hos alldeles fel läsare. Intressant nog var det så att jag trots de dåliga förutsättningarna uppskattade boken till ganska stor del.

Att det är bok långt fram i en serie betyder att det är en stor mängd personer inblandade i berättelsen som inte presenteras särskilt ingående och inte heller har några större roller i det hela. Samma sak gäller ett par händelser som det syftas tillbaka på ett par gånger i boken, men som inte beskrivs alls vad de innebar. Det har gjort mig nyfiken att ta reda på mera om personerna och händelserna, så det är möjligt att jag kommer att leta upp de tidigare böckerna i serien bara för att få veta mer.

Berättelsen i sig var en för mig tillräckligt spännande historia med en rimlig intrig. Boken kändes lite kort, och en ganska stor del av fokus låg bredvid själva brottsfallet och dess utredning. Ett stort tema i boken är vinstdrivande företag inom vården, vilket är ett ämne som är hyfsat aktuellt just nu men jag är rädd kommer att kännas gammalt och dammigt ganska fort. Språket är synnerligen lättläst, men jag var till en början förvirrad av mordoffrets monoler/samtal med läsaren som återkommer då och då i boken utan att tillföra något extra.

Trots bristerna som jag upplevde i boken har den lockat mig till att kanske leta upp de tidigare böckerna i serien för att få veta mer. Det är sig ett gott betyg till den här boken.

Bordelleri fallera


Recursion is fascinating.
I had the idea to make a song that would also function as a computer program with which the song could be played, or alternatively make a computer program that would be able to transform its own zeros and ones into music. That project did not end with a satisfactory result, neither in terms of music nor programming.
I also had an idea to make electronic music, which in principle would sound the same when played at significantly different speeds. This would work in a similar way as those images which repeat themselves when zooming in on them. That project actually worked, but not very well artistically.
This song is an experiment of using the program that plays the song as an instrument in the song. Of course I had to cheat somewhat by cutting the program into pieces and stretching and compressing its waveform.
The song was created in connection to a brothel-themed party at my student residence. Hence the title.