A stream of consciousness by Laurence Hughes

I’ve recently been updating my website over a series of nights and weekends. The changes aren’t very noticeable to the eye but involved some careful modernisation and streamlining of back-end features and technology, plus improvements to accessibility and performance. I’m really happy to have made them.

Danish composer and producer Marie Louise Buch’s LP from last year is on heavy rotation chez moi at the moment. It’s a chill but heartfelt mix of sun-drenched guitars, electronics and ML’s pure vocals that has elements of The Durutti Column and maybe even The Cocteau Twins… and it’s really hitting the spot for me.

You can preview in full and buy on Bandcamp.

Thanks to Phillip H for the excellent recommendation. And I’m of course now jealous that I wasn’t a fan of ML in time to go to her Glasgow gig last year.

I didn’t have the appetite for Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel during the pandemic. I started it, but as the underlying sense of melancholy and “something bad around the corner” began to set in – just like it did in Never let me go – I realised I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. Cut to 2025 and it was time to give it another go.

I’d read before that Ishiguro is primarily interested in exploring what it is to be human, and uses science and technology elements as a device to support that. In Never let me go the device was cloning. In this book, the narrator is an “artificial friend” named Klara who is an AI-powered, empathetic android, and Ishiguro uses Klara’s unique perspective to shine a light on human behaviour and motivations.

I won’t attempt to properly review the book when others have done it much better. I’ll just say I really enjoyed it and recommend it.

Here are a few scrappy notes about themes I found interesting and jotted down.

• Scientific and technological advancements that present moral questions
• the idea of genetic editing (modification, I guess) to gain advantage, but with risks and side-effects. The gamble this represents.
• human loneliness
• blind faith/religion (which even Klara, as a rational machine, learned)
• Klara’s capacity for innocence, morality, contentment in a way that the humans seemed incapable of
• The idea that we can’t create identical clones of people because it’s not just their makeup that makes them unique; there’s also how others love and perceive them (which can’t be copied)
• the potential dark side-effects of our societal choices and technological advances: environment collapse and pollution; societal divisions (the father Paul’s armed community)

Clair bought me Jude Rogers’ book for Christmas thinking I would enjoy it – and I did. I love the idea of chronicling the milestones of your life using music – music that touched you, that you were obsessed with, or that bonded you with significant others.

I also enjoyed reading the science behind the feelings. As Jude asked in the first chapter:

How do songs affect our emotions so profoundly? How can they activate memories instantly?

It turns out that babies can recall what they heard while in the womb, and are predisposed to get music in a manner beyond advanced computers. The medial prefontal cortex – an area of the brain linked to our sense of self – is involved in tracking melodies. There are lots of these interesting insights.

Jude’s tunes ranged from Abba to Krafterk to Toots and the Maytals, which I found good fun. And as proof of music’s facility for time-travel, her final chapter on Prefab Sprout’s I trawl the megahertz transported me back instantly to my desk at Bright Signals’ office in 2018 during my contract there, where my friend Andy’s playlists introduced me to that unique tune.