June Music

Music I’ve bought in June.

A couple years ago, I started buying all the records that Ze Records had released, but when I got to 1983, I forgot to buy the rest. I’ve now remedied that unfortunate situation, and the last few albums are pretty good? But not as interesting as the ones from the prime era (i.e., 1979-81-ish).

I don’t think anybody has written a book about Ze’s history? They have an interesting output — starting off very New York downtown with Arto Lindsay, James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Suicide and Mars, but also with songs like Disco Clone by Cristina and, of course, Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

So they were at the intersection between post-punk and the jokier end of dance music — and in the end, the latter basically took over completely. And not everything they released was great, of course, but it was fun and interesting while it lasted.

And one of the last albums I bought was a James White (of James Chance fame) album, which was very apposite since he died last week.

Here’s his most famous hit, I guess:

Contort Yourself (August Darnell Remix)

But all the albums are great.

Let’s see… what else did I get.

Oh yeah!

Beth Gibbons - Lost Changes (Official Video)

Beth Gibbons (of Portishead fame) finally has a solo album out, and it’s great.

Adult Jazz - Dusk Song (Official Video)

The Adult Jazz albums is very nice.

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - To Music (Official Video)

The new album from Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion is wonderful.

Onion Orange (live)

And the collection of live tracks and oddities from Gastr del Sol is great, too.

Yeah, it’s been a really good month for music! So there.

Further Emacs Interface Innovations

Yesteday I was musing about different input mechanisms for fiddling around with the look of charts. But then, while falling asleep, I thought “why not just put all the control in a buffer”, and so I did.

The result is on Microsoft Github, and it’s in a pretty rough state because I’m slightly busy today, but here’s a demonstration:

Eh? Eh? No, I don’t know either.

And now I’m off to wash the car.

Emacs eplot UI vs UX

A few days ago I pushed a new library for making charts interactively in Emacs to Microsoft Github. One suggestion was to use transient or something to allow customising the look of the charts instead of adding headers to the data buffer.

Which makes a lot of sense — you don’t want to alter the data just to plot something. But on the other hand, I didn’t really know what it’d look like — for UX stuff, you really have to just try.

Behold! The most thrilling video in the history of videos! That are thrilling!

And… It’s got discoverability going for it, but it seemed to take kinda a long time? OK, let’s try the same with headers (this is an unrehearsed screen recording, but of course I know what the header names are, kinda sorta):

That took as long, really.

Anybody else got ideas here? More interactivity would be nice, and of course I could see resizing the chart with the mouse or something, but how do you express “raise the grid to the front of the chart and make it less opaque”?

Perhaps a double tap triple finger swirl counter clockwise. Yeah, that’s how Steve Jobs would have done it.