On the ninety minute drive today I was having an anxious morning, so I put on some music that always centers me, gives me wicked amsr, and just strips away layers and lets me focus. I have a lot of songs i like to use to do that, but an all time favorite of mine is 10cc “I’m Not in Love.” Here- have a listen. Put on a good set of cans (over the head earphones) or get in your listening seat for the stereo, dim the lights, and let it wash over you:
One of the things I love about this is that it was made in the early 70’s- 1975, I think. But that wall of sound you feel and hear that sends goose bumps up my arms and down my spine and legs- it’s not a synthesizer. It’s so much more than that. In fact it’s actually insane what they did. That synth sound is actually layered and looped audio tracks. They recorded harmonizing in every note and octave, and then what they did is manually, by cutting and splicing reel to reel tape, looped it and layered it. It’s a staggering achievement if you have ever worked with reel to reel.
Here is a reel to reel:
That piece in between the two reels flips up, and it is a grooved splicing block so you can take the tape off the audio heads, mark it with a wax pen, splice out the section you want, etc. I spent thousands of hours playing with these in the early 80’s at the radio station. Hell, here is another video showing the technique:
At any rate, to achieve that synth sound, the first recording audio tracks of three of them humming ahhhhh in a variety of notes and octaves, and replicated it over and over again and used it as the chorus they send through the mixing board. It’s fucking insane. The amount of patience and the 20 hours days just to get one second of sound a couple of notes just right.
AI can never do that. Only humans can do something like that. When a musician, or artist, or actor, or author, or potter, or master carpenter, or pianist- when they do something like that, they are giving a part of themselves to us. If you pay attention and listen, there are little Sistine Chapels and Vitruvian men everywhere. AI can never do that.
AI can only imitate and replicate, it can not create. Machines can not feel so they don’t know how to evoke feelings. Real art is a Colorado Blue Spruce on the mountainside. AI is a plastic white Christmas tree. We can tell what it is supposed to be, but we can feel, smell, and see what it isn’t.
Fund the fucking arts. I am going to go watch an episode of Foundation before watching my first football game of the year- dem Stillers versus da Bungles.
MLB League Championship Series – Oct 16
hells littlest angel
Huh. Today I learned that this is not an Elton John song.
Omnes Omnibus
I tried watching Foundation and I just could not get into it at all.
lowtechcyclist
I remember that song from when it was on the radio, wasn’t a big fan of it then, and can’t say I miss it. But to each his own.
I’ve got my own songs to get me in a Zen sort of groove. I’m partial to Camila Cabello’s “Havana” these days.
Can’t say I’ve seen any of the TV version of Foundation, but assuming it’s based on Asimov’s trilogy, I figure it would have to be incredibly different to work. Asimov’s characters were wooden (AI-generated characters might’ve been an improvement!) and chaos theory blew the series’ premise right out of the universe. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions FTW.
SteveinPHX
Wonderful work in the studio. One of my all time favorites.
Thanks for all the background on the recording!
Omnes Omnibus
@hells littlest angel:
Just wait till you find out what 10cc refers to.
SpaceUnit
@Omnes Omnibus:
Please don’t.
Billd
Groovy, man.
Doc Sardonic
Ace Frehley has passed….RIP Spaceman
FastEdD
AI really is atrocious and puts musicians who have spent a lifetime honing their craft out of work. I’ve toiled at learning pedal steel. It has taken me 20 years to become a slightly less embarrassing beginner although I’ve been a guitarist for 60 years. There are only a few really good steel players in LA. For $50 you can buy a plugin for your DAW, enter the chords and a few prompts, and there’s your pedal steel track. No soul, of course, and terrible nonetheless.
On the other hand, I used AI to do something called a “stem splitter.” I had an old cassette tape I made in 1988 of a really good band I performed with at the Troubadour. I wrote all the songs and the audience was appreciative that night, but the tape wasn’t very good. It was not distorted, but it was mono and the mix was terrible. The keyboards were way too loud and you couldn’t hear the vocals. Run it through the stem splitter, remix it and add some background vocals and a couple guitars, and voila. Sounds awesome. A moment frozen in time but it sounds like it should. AI did that, even though all the instruments and vocals were humans, all the songs written by humans.
AI is about 95% garbage, but sometimes it can be used carefully.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: And then there’s The Lovin’ Spoonfull…
M. Bouffant
Oh yeah. Used to splice tape at the Pacifica station in Houston in 1971. Only had a 45 degree diagonal on our splicing block, & no fancy zero setting on the deck ‘though.
Also: The Edgar Winter Group’s song “Frankenstein” was so named because of all the splicing that was done on it.
WaterGirl
@FastEdD:
You could have just stopped there.
trollhattan
Love this, Cole. Genius song, genius recording, and never resolves whether “he loves me/he loves me not.”
10CC had a terrific three or four-album run and then Creme and Godley went off to do their thing and put out a couple of bangers, themselves.
Hours of fun listening, to the curious.
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, remember the Lovin’ Spoonful?
trollhattan
@different-church-lady: Jinx!
Jackie
Thanks for the song! Memories are washing over me… :-)
Castor Canadensis
@FastEdD: It’s “averaging” its data. Expect a formally mediocre result.
FastEdD
Yes I know what 10cc means, and I wish I didn’t. If you’ve ever spent time messing around in recording studios, you’ll appreciate how Sgt. Pepper was done on a FOUR track. Unbelievable. Bouncing entire orchestras from track to track.
bbleh
As noted elsewhere, AI does not DO meaning; it does pattern-matching.
XeckyGilchrist
10cc really did do a lot of amazing stuff.
Huge respect to everyone who could do those incredible techniques with a tape recorder but damn I’m glad nobody has to anymore.
WTFGhost
It was here, or at Digby’s, where someone suggested the writer for The Wire could have used AI to try out ten different transitions, if he wasn’t sure how to transition.
The response? “I’d rather stick a gun in my mouth.”
And I can see that, because, if you’re having a hard time with a scene, there’s a reason. And if you would be willing to try something random, I can’t speak for other writers, but I just force-write it, make all the obvious decisions, and close the scene out. Sometimes, you then see “this sucks because…” and then, you see what you hadn’t, until you worked your own creative solutions.
XeckyGilchrist
@FastEdD: One of the big problems with AI is that the term encompasses a large number of completely different kinds of software, with different uses and different effectiveness, and it’s all just been lumped together for splashy marketing reasons.
I quite agree with you in these cases about which uses are good and which ones aren’t.
FastEdD
@Castor Canadensis: But have it separate a vocal and listen to it. No bleeding of tracks, just vocal. It can be creepy though, like the Beatle song (Real Love I think) done with a demo of John’s. The original tape was mono and they pulled the vocal and piano into two separate tracks. Then added other musicians. Should it be done, just because you can? I’m not sure.
hueyplong
I remember Cole’s 10cc song and get where he’s coming from, but the song that did that for me was A Day in the Life.
FastEdD
@XeckyGilchrist: Exactly.
Ohio Mom
So far, the only use of AI I’ve personally witnessed was in Ohio Son’s pyschiatrist’s office. She announced she was going to use AI to take notes (so we could object if we wanted) and damn, if the visit summary printed out at the end of the appointment wasn’t an accurate, decently-written recap of the discussion.
Plus, we got to see her face, she wasn’t hunched over the laptop for the entire meeting, typing away furiously as doctors have been doing for the last couple of decades.
But creative work, that’s another story. Artists show us things too wonderful or too awful for the rest of us to ever imagine on our own. I haven’t seen any evidence that computer technology can “think” beyond what has been uploaded.
Artists, whatever their medium, have a personal style. That’s why you can hear a new (at least to you) song by someone you are familiar with and immediately recognize the artist. Or why I can walk into a gallery of post-war art and immediately point to each piece and say, Motherwell, Rothko, Gottleib, Frankenthaler, etc.
In general, I remain very skeptical about AI, based on my experience on spell check. That should be a pretty easy application and it still stinks.
different-church-lady
@trollhattan: Delightful madness, those two.
bbleh
BTW since open thread, and this likely has been mentioned elsewhere, but just wanted to say re Bolton indictment, it’s Comey 2.0 and I feel even LESS bad about this one.
What happens when even the Nazi guards melt when the Ark is opened? The audience cheers! THEY didn’t open it, they had families etc and so on, but yeah so what? And in this case, Obergruppenführer Bolton had rank on his shoulders!
May they devour themselves, amen.
piratedan
I get what JC was saying, some songs evoke a mood which makes the song bigger than the sum of its parts, but naturally its a YMMV kind of thing. I have a laundry list of go to songs based on mood, when I want to feel like I am reliving a memory.
My list has tunes like The Crystals “Then He Kissed Me” to the Raveonettes “Red Tan” to the Everly Brothers “On The Wings of a Nightingale” to Los Lobos doing “Be Still”, just songs that resonate personally because of the lyric, the melody, the melding of each into a whole.
It’s a good thing I’m not passionate about such things or else I could end up being incredibly tedious…. :-)
FastEdD
The most incredible tape editing example was Strawberry Fields. Two different takes done on two different days, in two different keys. Seamless, and now you can’t even hear it any other way.
Baud
@FastEdD:
Sounds about right. I’ve used AI productively, but it seems like the waste far exceeds the benefits.
Omnes Omnibus
@bbleh: Political prosecutions are terrible no matter how much the defendant sucks.
hueyplong
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree. I’m never rooting for Trump’s authoritarianism, regardless of the nature of the victim, though if Trump went after Alex Jones, it might present a conundrum calling for the appearance of a meteor.
piratedan
@Omnes Omnibus: I hear ya, it’s hard for the MAGA to understand that I want their heroes prosecuted because they broke the law, not because they are their heroes…. they have a hard time understanding that nuance it seems.
bbleh
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree, which is why I don’t say I feel GOOD about it, merely less bad. And those poor guards were just doing their jobs after all …
Subcommandante Yakbreath
Related factoid: The original theme for Dr. Who was composed by Ron Grainer and realized using tape splicing techniques by Delia Derbyshire, a very early electronic music luminary. On the off chance anybody is interested, November 23 is Delia Derbyshire Day,
trollhattan
@different-church-lady:
GREAT choice.
Also fond of I Pity Inanimate Objects.
Ryan
Are you all excited about the Hate America rallies tomorrow? I’m sorry, but if that’s the best Pastor Johnson can muster, he’s overpaying his messengers.
Misamericanthrope
I remember that song from my youth. Was always fascinated by the soundscape. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I realized that the singer was trying to convince himself, rather than making a direct statement. Really bumped up my appreciation of the song.
on a side note, one of my go-to ASMR tracks is “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno from “Another Green World”. I still find it exhilarating.
Matt McIrvin
I once saw a video by some British car guy on YouTube who noted that the sound made by Hyundai electric and hybrid vehicles when they’re on electric drive (so as not to be a silent menace to pedestrians) sounds exactly like the heavily processed backing vocals from “I’m Not In Love”, and now I can’t un-hear it. And now you probably can’t.
bbleh
@Ryan:
marshalingpeacekeeping in Philly, and hell yes! And if the video is anything at all like last time, the Republicans are right to be wetting themselves in fear.M31
did some tape splicing years ago and oh yeah it’s fiddly fussy work
LOL was just remembering that if you dropped your razor blade (old single-edge style) on the floor the Earth’s magnetic field would magnetize it and then when you made cuts there’d be a little ‘pop’
our studio had a little gizmo to demagnetize, but better to just get a new blade, sharper anyway
Baud
@Ryan:
Saturday.
People should carry signs that day “Love America Rally”
SteverinoCT
@FastEdD: Something I read about Ringo (maybe George Martin, or one of the engineers?) was that he was so steady and consistent that they didn’t have to adjust the speed of different takes when they mixed them: he kept the beat right on.
mrmoshpotato
@Doc Sardonic: RIP
trollhattan
@FastEdD:
Only read a detailed breakdown of Strawberry Fields recording recently. “Let’s just do stuff nobody else has.”
George Martin’s genius included the calliope or whatever it is at the end of For the Benefit of Mister Kite. He cuts the tape into pieces, tosses it and reassembles the bits randomly for what goes on the final version.
Maybe he was inspired by Burroughs, IDK.
MagdaInBlack
“I’m Not In Love”: summer of ’75, between my junior and senior years of hs. It was a very drunken summer, and the year I started dating my future husband. These 2 things are somewhat related.
mrmoshpotato
@WTFGhost:
Thats definitely a David Simon response.
bbleh
@Baud: what people DO carry in my experience (in addition to some VERY creative signs) is American flags. Every protest and march — including but not limited to the No Kings one — has been FULL of American flags — big ones, small ones, all over the place.
ANY experience of ANY length with these marches gives the immediate lie to the flop-sweat-ridden Republican propaganda. And yes that doesn’t reach the people who never encounter much of the outside world and believe what they’re told by their Republican betters, but whatever. The truth is overwhelmingly, obviously, blindingly otherwise than Republicans say.
Matt McIrvin
@Misamericanthrope: I love pop songs with unreliable narrators (about 75% of They Might Be Giants’ discography is like that), but the technique is notoriously prone to misfire because most listeners barely listen to lyrics in the first place.
SteverinoCT
John didn’t mention the whisper. This is from Wikipedia:
raven
My buddy with his reel-to-reel in his hooch at Camp Enari in 1969. He had just got there and I was on my way home. The first thing I did when I got out was to go to the Fillmore and see some band named Santana! I bought the album and taped it and sent it back to him!
Matt McIrvin
@bbleh: Lots of old guys with veteran caps carrying American flags. People who any idiot would assume are Trump supporters just from how they look.
Misamericanthrope
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah. It’s now hard for me to believe that I ever interpreted it as a straightforward proclamation. I think I was too caught up in the sound to actually contemplate the lyrical content.
currawong
I left school in 1974 and went to work in London. The Original Soundtrack album was released in 1975 and in 1976 I went to see 10cc at the Hammersmith Odeon, one of the main music venues in London at the time. I’m Not in Love has always been one of my favourites.
Coincidentally, the last concert we saw before the arrival of COVID was 10cc at one of Melbourne Zoo’s twilight concerts in January 2020. It’s mainly Graham Gouldman’s band now but they still sound pretty good.
Matt McIrvin
@Misamericanthrope: One way to handle it is to do like The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” or Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know”: bring in another vocalist on the second verse calling out the first verse as bullshit.
bbleh
@Matt McIrvin: lol so, it turns out, am I. That’s kind of fun, actually. (Except no cap.)
raven
@Matt McIrvin: Who you callin old?
Steve in the ATL
@Ohio Mom:
And which of those is Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?
Scout211
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: I generally don’t play music when I drive, and that’s because I like the ambient sound: the tires on the road, the wind whistling by, the ca-chunk ca-chunk of road seams, and stuff like that.
You think that’s weird? Here’s something weirder: Because the human brain tries to make patterns of whatever sensory input it’s getting, the ambient sound of tires-on-asphalt always, always, sounds to me like the monolith chorus from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
So basically I’m driving along to the sound of the monolith.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve in the ATL: Depends on which panel of the triptych.
bbleh
@CaseyL: uh, and when it reaches ecstatic levels and starts to scream, do you reflexively cover your ears with your hands?
Also, which routes do you take? Asking for a friend.
/s
Interesting Name Goes Here
@Omnes Omnibus: …So, I don’t know what I was expecting, but not only was that much tamer than I feared, but it was also a misunderstanding of the supposed figure.
Seriously, I thought this was going to be some reference to a horrific event that I’d forever regret having in my search history.
Kelly
@Omnes Omnibus: I watched about half of Foundation season 1. I’m usually a sci fi guy but I just did not care what was next.
zhena gogolia
@raven: Great picture!
CaseyL
@bbleh:
Hah! The chorus never gets to that part, though it is interesting, in a horrific way, to wonder what the road would need to do for that to happen.
And you were joking, but I’ll answer anyway: freeways, where there are fewer changes in road surface and fewer slow downs. So, yes, the best time to hear the monolith chorus is driving the freeway, very early in the morning or at night, when there isn’t much traffic :)
Raven
@zhena gogolia: Yea, unfortunately he died almost 10 years ago. He was a surveyor for a mining company in Louisa Kentucky and he hit a deer on his motorcycle.
Ohio Mom
@Baud: I’m bringing my American flag. I’m not entirely sure I love this country but I am committed to it.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: found György Ligeti!
Raven
@Ohio Mom: It’s a thin line. . .
zhena gogolia
@Raven: I’m sorry.
raven
@zhena gogolia: Yea, it’s been quite a while. We went to high school together and I’ve always been thankful we got to spend time together.
Jager
I spent 49 years in radio, transitioning from all-night jock to managing 6 stations,4 FM and 2 AM. I was there at the beginning of FM rock. All of the production was done with razor blades on tape. until the early 90s, when the digital machines showed up. We were using 4-track in the production studio in the late 60s. The production guys in that era were dedicated, creative experts. One of my old co-workers (in his 70s) is still as sharp as a tack and can wield a blade with the best of them, there were any of them were around to compete with. I just gave him a project, putting together a collage of all the stations I managed from Boston to the West Coast.
A broker called me last week and put me in contact with a guy who just purchased 6 stations. He wanted some advice, I told him, “Hire a bunch of kids, tell them to make their friends happy, with one rule: ‘They can’t say FUCK on the air.” What did the asshole do with one of his FMs? He put conservative talk on in a market that is D plus 20! That’s enough, I’ll just be angrier, and sleep even less than I do.
On the way home today I listened to the Dodger pregame on KLAC. The production sucked.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin:
György Ligeti?
Well, let’s see what that’s all ab—- good lord.
Pretty close!
WaterGirl
@Scout211: That is excellent news
My summary of Trump attorneys:
trollhattan
More pushback against Donny destroying anything good.
Ohio Mom
@Raven: I just don’t see how it is possible to love something as amorphous and abstract as a country.
There are moments I look at Ohio Dad or Ohio Son, or other family and friends, and they are so themselves, so adorable and they are mine, and my heart bursts with affection. There are moments when everything seems just right and I marvel at just being alive (I think some people call that a glimmer).
But a nation state? I’ve driven across this country twice and still, most of it is completely unknown to me. How can I possibly love North Dakota or Arkansas, they are strangers to me.
I can admire parts of our history and be stirred by our ideals, I can be thankful that this country gave my grandparents safe harbor but I can just as soon be disgusted at this country’s shortcomings.
But I am here and will be for the rest of my life. It’s like the family I was born into, might as well make the best of it.
bbleh
@Jager: conservabros are agents of ruin. Not only are they douchebags generally, but their judgment suuuxxxx …
As proof, I offer the recent Politico article, complete with photos, re the leaked conservabro chats.
A lot of them are in “investments.” Beware. This has been a Public Service Announcement.
Jackie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agree. And another blaring difference between Dems and today’s MAGA party.
NotMax
The entire eponymous album by Emitt Rhodes (released in 1970) was recorded on reel to reel (on equipment in his garage. IIRC) He does all the vocals and plays all the instruments, In fact, imprinted in script in the blank space between the end of the last track and the label is “Recorded at Home.” Sample track.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
I think the Greeks used different words for love to deal with the conundrum you expressed.
WaterGirl
@Scout211:
Actually, this from the article is downright frightening.
NO KINGS
raven
@Ohio Mom: there it is
BigJimSlade
@trollhattan: He’s hooked and trying to deny it. The denial throughout the song without admitting it is part of why its great :-)
different-church-lady
@CaseyL:
That’s because the “chorus” actually was the sounds of tires on asphalt, run through a harmonizer.
HinTN
@bbleh: I bought a 20 pack of the small, child safe American flags on sticks to take to our very red county seat on Saturday.
Old Dan and Little Ann
This song reminds me sitting in the dentist office or walking through some Sibley’s store when I was 6 in 1981
Edited to add I’ve always thought it was pretty terrible.
John Cole
FWIW since it was brought up, John Bolton is on my “Graves I will travel to and piss on traveling the country in my mobile home” list, but political prosecutions are bad. Period.
bbleh
@WaterGirl: Sorry to say, but I give it better than 50% that he — on his own or basically under the control of the people in his inner circle — will invoke the Insurrection Act, and sooner rather than later.
I also think, like the rest of their atrocities, it will be applied very selectively, in conformance with the usual Republican bigotries and biases, and a LOT of normies won’t even be aware it’s happened.
Chigail
@Matt McIrvin: I really like the song but hate my Kona EV when it tries to sing it.
hitchhiker
I’m reading Karen Hao’s book, Empire of AI, because — as with bitcoin — I ignored the news about AI right up until recently. Unstable new products aren’t fun to follow from the distance I am from Silicon Valley, for obvious reasons. Who the fuck knows what’s going on? Not even the guys at the center of it.
Hao had an upfront seat for a lot of this, which makes the book reliable but also frustrating because she’s SO in the weeds that it reads like an insider map, often minus the decoder.
The title is a reference to more familiar empires, and she makes the metaphor work from a variety of angles. Let’s steal all your land (scrape the internet), destroy you if you complain, and charge you for services you didn’t ask for, for example.
I decided to make the effort to read the book after seeing the news the other day that OpenAI is going to sell porn. Apparently the bet is that it will be worth giving up unfathomable quantities of water, energy, and land for millions of people to experience solo sex in a new way.
It might be a fitting resolution to this particular endeavor, but — given that Sam Altman has decided he’s the man to make sure AI is a net benefit to humanity — my confidence is pretty low.
Matt McIrvin
@CaseyL: The monolith chorus is specifically the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem. The film also uses Ligeti’s Atmospheres and Lux Aeterna, and a munged-up bit of Aventures.
Kubrick actually commissioned a whole custom score for the movie from Gary North, but ended up ditching it and just using the classical pieces he’d used as editing reference.
Miki
I actually remember 1975, fondly. I was 19/20 yrs old, attending DLI in Monterey. Wow. Really wow.
Asimolar Beach was a beyond intense, especially when accompanied by Pablo Cruise’s Ocean Breeze.
lgerard
Camera Obscura cover of that tune
youtube.com/watch?v=x0PZKJmBeN0&list=RDx0PZKJmBeN0&start_radio=1
always partial to stripped down versions of classic tunes
KrackenJack
Ok, that’s some synchronicity. Listening to the FIP Main livestream* while checking out the front page. Five minutes later they start playing “I’m Not in Love.”
* radiofrance.fr/fip
TONYG
I was never a big fan of 10cc, although I appreciate their skill. The album from that era that I’ve been listening to frequently for more than a half-century is “Who’s Next”.
Jeffro
Great time tonight sitting in on a live session of the Jim Acosta show with none other than Michael Fanone as the guest.
Not so great time listening to an Atlantic panel blather on about jobs, work, why can’t we have nice things anymore when the answer is SO obvious: because we used to have the resources (via progressive taxation) to fund the things that our society as a whole needed. Decades later, after most all of our productivity gains have ended up in billionaires’ pockets, it’s just this HUGE fucking mystery.
Anyway – details tomorrow!
RoseWeiss
Thanks for that, JG. I hadn’t heard that song in many years, but it was once a fave. I took your advice, turned up the volume, closed my eyes, and was transported back decades.
Jackie
Interesting.
I guess they could resign in protest?
Denali5
Thanks for sharing. I remember the song well.
laura
I can’t speak to splicing, or add anything about 10cc, but I can address the subject of asmr music, and as the Blogfather is going to be hauling out to his Mrs., it is time to learn and listen to Hermanos Gutierrez. Behold!: hermanosgutierrez.ch/music. A taste: youtu.be/wTqCthvtL8k?
Glorious music I tells ya!
Pennsylvanian
Did anyone, ever, know a more lovable nerd?
John Cole, I don’t care what they say about you, I think you are the bee’s knees. Life can wear one down. I seek and find community here and am so grateful, no matter how many wayward animals, children or unsuspecting things that need our attention.
No Kings.
CaseyL
@Matt McIrvin: Interesting! Now I need to go listen to all those.
YY_Sima Qian
One the rare US MSM articles that is relatively comprehensive & nuanced in summarizing the sequence of events, & thus the chain of causality, that led to the latest round of tit-for-tat in the Sino-US trade/tech. war (gift link to NYT article below):
The key dynamic to watch in this particular contest:
But the more fundamental forces at work:
Refining/processing rare earth elements & manufacturing rare earth magnets require a lot of technical know how (to achieve high purity & mitigate environmental impact), but is far less challenging than cracking EUV lithography. OTOH, the PRC has been working on domestic solutions to the semiconductor manufacturing value chain for much long than the West has on rare earths, & has done so w/ intense funding, focus & coordination since the John Bolton got Canada to detain Huawei’s CFO (& daughter of its founder) during a transit in 2018 w/o telling Trump, & Biden implemented broad export controls on semiconductor in 2022. The PRC also benefits from a much larger & faster growing (also younger, & thus likely more productive) STEM workforce. The West has made little progress over the past 15 years.
One reference point is Japan. Ever since the PRC temporarily withheld refined/processed rare earths exports when dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands flared up in 2010, Japan has devoted significant effort to de-risk from the PRC supply chain for rare earths. In 15 years, it is now making the majority of rare earth magnets that it consumes domestically (though still reliant upon the PRC for the rest), & reduced dependence for light rare earths from > 90% to 60%, it is still almost entirely dependent on the PRC for heavy rare earths. The alternative supply chain Japan helped to establish for light rare earths (in Australia & Malaysia) has also needed Chinese equipment & IP transfer. MP Minerals, the US great big hope for “rare earth independence”, has a PRC state owned company as a minority shareholder, because it needed Chinese IP to stand up its light rare earth refining & processing, heavy rare earths has yet to start.
Yet Another Haldane
The “indie rock collective” Gayngs released an album in 2010 called “Relayted” with every track (loosely!) based on “I’m Not in Love.” Gayngs was (is?) a side project led by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, with some impressive talent. Here’s Wikipedia on the album and the collective:
Relayted
Gayngs
It’s worth a listen, especially if you like 10cc and/or Bon Iver.
Drunkenhausfrau
I’ve always loved that song so much and never knew the details. Thank you.
Miss Bianca
@raven: I remember my oldest brother sent home a reel to reel recorded letter from boot camp (or whatever you call it when you’re in the Navy) in ’68, and there was some noise and vaguely familiar song coming from the background, and finally Tag announcing, “oh, yeah, some of the guys have that new Beatles album” – and it was, of course, The White Album.
Paul in KY
@SteverinoCT: Heard “they never missed a take due to Ringo” and that was because he was like a metronome and also so good. Saw him about a month ago at Bourbon & Beyond. Was hilight of the weekend for me.
Paul in KY
@SteverinoCT: Did they pay her? That would have convinced me.
Paul in KY
@SteverinoCT: Probably the Cure song also. Too.
Paul in KY
@John Cole: I’m looking forward to getting up to Louisville when the reaper calls him back to Hell to water his lawn. Probably won’t be long now…
Paul in KY
@Miki: I was a sophomore in HS. Was a fine year for me. My Class of 75 had alot of cool people in it.
Paul in KY
@TONYG: I know everyone here is super-cool and all, but the 10cc song I like the best is ‘The Things We do for Love’.
JustRuss
Weird, this is the third day in a row I’ve encountered 10cc’s I’m Not In Love. Heard it last night waiting in line at a gelato shop in downtown Portland. Which, believe it or not, was not on fire.