That Was The Week That Was — 12th April 2026
Schubert’s imagination was unusually literary. Words released music in him: poems about desire, love, loss, solitude, the longing for rest; narrative ballads; philosophical poems; theological poems; poems about death; poems about nature; poems about the paranormal.
That passage in the LRB about Franz Schubert further enhanced my strong-held belief how our imaginations are best fuelled when reading on a variety of subjects and styles. I don't mean reading on a device — though that can have it's uses — I mean conscious reading when you shut the rest of the world away and escape into another, whether that be non-fiction or fiction. Whilst I read both, fiction allows for the creation of other worlds and scenarios and for me at least nourishes more than the non-fiction variety. Whatever the genre though as Werner Herzog likes to say "read, read,read."
Work continued this week in Touch Designer on the Beyond Tellerrand graphics. The core idea was that the event is a meeting place where lots of ideas are shared, conversations had, which let you see the world through a different lens. So I started to play with the ideas of distortion, alternative views using typography and a simple sketch-like line motif, which is created using a deterministic system, so the same seed would generate the same shape and distortion. All the shapes start from using a manipulated 4x4 grid making a total of 16 points which is the number of characters in Beyond Tellerrand.
To create these sketch like lines I fed the points into a connectivity POP set to spiral per plane, resampled the line to give me more points on the line, then did a line smooth then finally used the sweep node from the POPX suite of tools to give the line some thickness.
New vinyl this week was the original 1979 pressing of Sister Sledge's We Are Family, produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. It opens with the classic He's the Greatest Dancer which to my mind is one of the best dance records ever made. Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci.
Always wonderful to hear the sound of a Blackbird as dawn breaks. Love Spring.
