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Tag: music

Mediaeval Baebes, Chelmsford Cathedral, 11dec25

Published December 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I’ve seen the Mediaeval Baebes a few times in the past. Once in a converted barn with deep snow outside, once at a mediaeval banquet in high summer when they were about six feet away from me. This time, at a cathedral, with great acoustics but a lousy mix – the instruments were too up front and the vocals got blanketed more than once. But their rendition of Gaudete was magnificent, quite the best I’ve heard them do it. The current line-up includes a high soprano whose voice is just remarkable. I got gifted an old Miranda Sex Garden CD while there (thanks, Lee) which delighted me – I was around for Miranda Sex Garden, way back when, but only had a tape, as I recall.

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HEROINE, Pauline Kim Harris

Published December 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Heard one track from this on the radio the other day (Deo) and had to have a copy. Shimmering and transcendent.

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BRIGHTLY SHONE THE MOON and GODDESSES OF ICELORE, Laura Cannell

Published December 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Next year I will probably buy more music by different people, honest. But I love her work and collector’s mania has set in at this point, I imagine. It’s basically muscle memory to buy her new work on sight.

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AMBIENT, Alice Thompson

Published December 6, 2025 by Warren Ellis

A bit spendy for a digital album, but the third track is worth the price of admission all on its own. Those big grainy washes and slow movements that have that indefinable Philip Jeck like tone to my (tin) ear

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Circle of Shadows ∞ Circle of Light, Jolanda Moletta

Published December 6, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Going to be breaking my physical-only rule a few times over the next few days, as there’s stuff I want to support and own that’s digital-only (or digital and tape, but I refuse to go back to the horrors of tapes).

Moletta’s NIGHT CAVES was magnificent, so this was an instant purchase for me. It’s a lovely, misty thing.

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telemetry 4dec25

Published December 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Nature has retracted a headline-grabbing climate-economics study after critics found flawed data that massively inflated its predicted global economic collapse. The New York Times reports: The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research (PDF). Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent. Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it — but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. “Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart.”

A man stands before a sinking ship. The ship will go down, the audience will watch, the metric will spike. Another entry in an endless algorithmic archive.

This is the logic of ultra-viral content: stunts, baroque challenges, a leap into lava. Each dare is designed to spike the dopamine drip yet leave no trace. The true danger was never the volcano, but the possibility that it might be lost in the scroll.

Culture is flattened by engines that reward repeatable extremes. A looped performance of risk reprocessed as engagement. Death, illegality, impossibility. All reduced to formats. 

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telemetry 2dec25

Published December 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet regardless of where they’re hosted.

As with all indieweb stuff, I lost the will to live less than halfway through the “getting started” section of the docs, but maybe this will be useful to someone, and maybe I should return to it after more coffee.

The Hare #9 [December 2025] by Andrew Chapman

Bronze Age/Neolithic complex find, Indian menhirs… and the original rock music

Read on Substack

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morning computer magnetic folklore

Published December 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Technology is always changing, quickly becoming dated or even obsolete as new updates are released. Remember LaserDiscs? What about 8-tracks? For Japanese musical trio Open Reel Ensemble, analog contraptions meet digital combinations to make unique and experimental sounds. Using reel-to-reel recorders from the 1970s and 1980s as musical instruments, the stage and studio setup is just as interesting as the recordings.

Delving into a nostalgic technology, the group describes their hybrid contraptions and techniques as “magnetic folklore instruments. They tap into a sense of nostalgia for reel-to-reel, also known as magnetic tapes. They’ve described their genre as “Magnetikpunk.”

China and Japan are also building “maglev” (magnetic levitation) train lines, the article points out — though it also includes this quote from rail expert and author Christian Wolmar. “Hyperloop is unworkable. The infrastructure it needs would be amazingly expensive to build and it can’t deliver the capacity to compete with high-speed railways or airlines. “It doesn’t integrate with existing transport modes, the infrastructure required to reach city centers would cause intolerable noise and disruption. And there are doubts over energy costs, capacity and passenger safety if something goes wrong at such high speeds…. “[T]he economics of it just don’t work.”

Scientists have captured an exceptionally rare, high-resolution view of an active region that produced two powerful X-class solar flares—an achievement rarely possible from Earth. Using the GREGOR solar telescope in Tenerife, researchers recorded the explosive activity of the sun’s most energetic sunspot group of 2025, revealing twisted magnetic structures and the early stages of flare ignition with unprecedented detail. The flares triggered fast coronal mass ejections that lit up Earth’s skies with vivid auroras in the nights that followed.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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