August 17, 2014No Comments

firstperson – little ambient Mix

I've put together a new ambient mix. It was recorded live and then tweaked in Ableton. The field recordings were captured with my ancient (but trusty!) MZ-R50 MiniDisc recorder and a stereo condenser mic.

Listen to it here or go to the Mixcloud page. If you have an account it would be great if you could give it a like and a share to help it can reach a wider audience.

Track list

  • Firstperson – field recording: Stamford morning
  • Stéphane Kerecki & John Taylor – La Source (intro)
  • Firstperson – field recording: Wet London street 1
  • Carroll Gibbons – The Night Is Young
  • Brock Van Wey – Forever a Stranger
  • Bill Evans – Spartacus Love Theme (sample, looped)
  • Firstperson – field recording: Rain on plastic roof
  • Tim Hecker – The Star Compass
  • Firstperson – field recording: Market day
  • Firstperson – microphone feedback experiment
  • Hallgrimskirkja Motet Choir – Jón Leifs – Requiem, Op. 33b
  • Firstperson – field recording: Wet London street 2
  • Future Sound Of London - Photosynthesis
  • Stephen Crow – Starquake, in-game sound effects (C64)
  • Arthur Russell – Another Thought
  • Spooky – Orange Coloured Liquid
  • Nick Drake – Hazy Jane II

July 17, 20141 Comment

New office

Ade Rowbotham Ltd HQ

Seventeen months ago I left the now-merged-with-Work Club Pirata. Since then I've been working on a number of projects mostly from home except for the occasional trip to London for meetings, pitches and so on. That's been fine to an extent as we have a decent office in our house but, as those who work from home will know, there are a number of pitfalls linked to the lack of formality normally associated with going to work and leaving work.

A recent spate of extremely late nights ("I must finish this thing") convinced me that something had to change. Other factors included: Frequent visits from my two-year-old son and the cats (welcome but distracting), ease of access to the fridge, and lack of exercise (sometimes not leaving the house at all in a 24 hour period when particularly busy).

Given that we've moved out of London we're lucky enough to have a reasonably large garden, so I had considered getting one of those garden-based studios or "posh sheds", but the investment at the moment is hard to justify. And walking to the garden is hardly a commute, psychologically speaking.

Then thanks to Twitter I discovered an office vacancy in the centre of Stamford, so I've taken the plunge and I moved in on Monday. With the obligatory Ikea trip and assembly mission out of the way, it's now time to get on with some work.

July 8, 2014No Comments

Wednesday 9 June

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Following an hour of dramatic wailing and howling Henry (our two year old son) has finally fallen asleep. We’re on a plane flying back from Malmö in Sweden where we've been staying with one of Rachael’s friends for a few days.

The root cause of the emotional drama, which started in the queue at the departure gate, was that he missed his morning sleep. This tends to bring about the end of the world anyway, but then when we had to force him into his own seat for takeoff the hysterics were cranked up to 11. I've had pleasanter flights.

Flight home aside it's been a much needed short break. The couple we stayed with have an enviably well designed modern house (one of them is a product designer and architect) which was well stocked with good food and wine. They were incredibly hospitable and generous, and they have a child just a bit older than Henry, so he had a friend to play with.

We took the train over to Copenhagen yesterday, and took the kids to Tivoli, which is a long-established theme park / fairground right in the centre. Worth a visit.

Drinks were drank last night and the Germany v Brazil match provided the excuse for our host to open a large bottle of Jägermeister. The hangover isn't helping matters today.

Landing at Stansted in half an hour. Mercifully Henry is still asleep.

Back to work tomorrow.

--

Update: He woke up of course. Still not happy. Also the pilot had to abort the landing just before we touched the Tarmac, and go around again. Not had that happen before.

June 29, 20141 Comment

On sharing

In the spirit of occasionally making an empty pledge to begin blogging again I'm writing this blog post (not just ‘blog’, please; a blog is that which contains a collection of blog entries or posts) to make a potentially empty pledge to begin blogging again.

I usually have one or two half-written posts saved as drafts. These are typically about things that (obviously) seemed important at the time – for example something political that’s riled me or something that seemed profoundly noteworthy – but which I’ve since been unable to complete due to my inability to succinctly communicate the nub of the sentiment or argument.

Sometimes only by writing something out in long form do I manage to clarify my own position on the matter, so writing the post serves that purpose and sometimes part of my conclusion is that it's not worth posting after all.

The other thing that keeps me from posting more often is the constant fear of coming across like a complete dick, getting on my high horse about something or other without having any claim to authority on the matter.

It seems the cooler people say less and keep their opinions to themselves. Should we all be more like that?

Personally I wish everyone were a little more open on the web. On Twitter most of my friends seem to have clammed up in the past few years. Now they'll only post the occasional work-related promotional tweet and rarely comment on their actual lives. I miss that. I've got nothing against self promotion but I'm not interested unless there's a healthy balance between that and some more wholesome, human content.

Maybe you're getting out of London for the day? You don't even have to say where you're going. Oh look you did something in advertising.

I'm not going to make the additional point that people probably aren't interested in my opinions, because this is my blog and anyone who chooses to read it has the option to simply not do so, in the same way that they can unfollow me on Twitter or whatever.

So fuck it, I'm going to try to post a little more often and I don't give a shit if someone finds it pretentious or boring, because life's too short to care too much about what other people think. And I actually really enjoy writing.

Rather than only compose and obsessively edit ‘grand’ and ponderous articles I'm going to post a few more every day life update entries. You're quite welcome to read them but these will be mainly for me. Life seems to fly past at an ever accelerating rate and it’s helpful to have some anchor points to look back on. Right now I genuinely have no idea what I was doing (other than work) three months ago. It’s quite terrifying.

April 1, 2014No Comments

New DJ Mix

Been meaning to get round to this for ages. I bought a Traktor Z1 mixer a few months ago and have been very occasionally dipping into Traktor 2 Pro. I also went on an ambitious vinyl recording spree, digitising the best of my records most of which are from 1994 - 1998.

However it was only when trying to put together a mix of old and new techno that I realised quite how much the genre has moved on in the past ten years. The 90s tunes are great but don't generally flow in with the new stuff (well, except for the timeless Basic Channel obviously).

I'll do a separate retro mix at some point in the next few months, which I imagine will be very different.

Anyway, I think this turned out OK given how rusty I am. There's a couple of clumsy transitions where the outgoing track ran out slightly too soon (haven't quite got the hang of looping in Traktor yet) and like a fool I managed to record it with the recorder's input gain at -12dB so I had to boost the finished recording by the same amount to compensate. Had it been recorded through an analogue mixer that would have killed it with noise.

June 17, 20131 Comment

New sort-of-site

aderowbotham.com.2013

Having left my big important position of responsibility in London I still need to take stock of all the work that I'm proud of from the past few years and put it together as a new portfolio. However, I've been pretty much flat out since the day I left Pirata, and I'm currently juggling three projects among other things, so it's going to be a little while yet. It’s a truism that your own website can be the hardest thing to get round to when paid work is vying for your time.

I bought a new laptop the other day and it has one of those ultra-high-resolution displays. It's a lovely bit of kit but (as is well documented) old software and old websites now look terrible on it, the graphics being either pixellated or blurred as they're scaled up. The newest of my personal sites was created in 2007, and looked particularly outdated on the new laptop so I decided that – at the very least – aderowbotham.com needed a quick and dirty makeover.

The old site was just the front and back of my business card from 2007:
aderowbotham.com.2008

The new site doesn't contain a whole lot more, but here are some of its key features:

  • Pretentious introductory ‘mission statement’ (in lieu of having some actual work to show)
  • Works on mobile (obv.)
  • Big silly tooltips
  • Shows off a few of my best photographs in high resolution
  • Some technical stuff that means it’s quick

Anyway, not much to see really. This post is mostly for myself, Google and of course The NSA. My website is at https://aderowbotham.com.

Next-up: a new CV.

March 28, 20135 Comments

Farewell Pirata

Pirata logo

After four years at Pirata I have very recently departed in order to pursue some personal ventures and to spend more time with my family. It's been an incredible four years during which we created a bounty of outstanding and beautiful work, took on some brave challenges and had a lot of fun together.

For me as Technical Partner the biggest satisfactions came from putting together a great team of talented and creative developers, and from overseeing the evolution of our capabilities as we went from building Flash microsites for ad campaigns to creating high profile high capacity dot-com sites in the contemporary world of HTML5, mobile and 'The Cloud'.

Much credit must of course also go to the design team which contains some remarkably talented individuals; Pirata's design prowess has always been second to none under the creative direction of Eduardo, Stuart and David. And I'll get in trouble now if I don't also include a nod to the producers. Of course nothing would have ever launched without you.

The key to great digital design is Agile integration with the development process – something we achieved more consistently than anywhere I've worked before, particularly so in the last year. We've always ensured that designers and developers sit and work together, and the quality of the work really shows for it.

Among the work I'm most proud of is the that which we've been doing for Team GB, not least teamgb.com itself which was a roaring success during London 2012. And more recently Pirata has re-designed and re-built the McLaren Formula 1 team's website from the ground up for the 2013 season. It still has McLaren Live during every Grand Prix, but it works better than ever before and looks fantastic.

I'd like to thank everyone past and present at Pirata for making it a brilliant four years, I'm going to miss everyone greatly and I wish you all the very best of luck! And likewise to all the splendid clients I've been fortunate enough to work with.

What now? Well I'm interested in talking to anyone about projets that lie anywhere around the cross section of technology and creativity. I have a lot of experience to bring to the table and would love to work with small teams of talented people to create tools, apps and games.

And in the short term I'd better get on because I have some websites to make. I still love doing that too.

February 3, 20131 Comment

Pirata featured in .net Magazine

This month's edition of .net magazine contains a feature on Pirata. It's based on an interview with Eduardo, Lee, Stuart and myself, in which we talk about our work over the past four years.

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dot-net-magazine-profile-pirata-2013-01b_web

July 15, 20122 Comments

Henry

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Hooray! After what felt like an endless final month of waiting our son Henry Thomas Rowbotham was born at 9:56am on Thursday 5th July. Both Rach and Henry are well, and they've been home for just over a week. It's been a brilliant and fun first week – if a little sleepless, naturally.

This is actually the first opportunity I've had since the birth to pick up the laptop and offload the photos off the camera. Here's a couple of shots, and for those who particularly enjoy other people's baby photos there are some more here on Flickr.

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Well done to Rach for enduring a less than fun pregnancy, and many thanks to all the wonderful NHS midwives and consultants who helped us through everything. And finally, welcome to the world Henry – enjoy it!

June 28, 20121 Comment

Timing

Today is my wife's and my fourth wedding anniversary, and it's the hottest and muggiest day of the year. R is beginning to show what *might be* the early signs of labour, and I've had to come home early from work due to the sudden onset of some flu-like virus which has me bedridden and delirious with a cold wet flannel on my forehead.

So much for that quiet romantic dinner...

(I will of course post any baby-related updates, if indeed they let me in the hospital like this.)

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