The advertising and selling of tickets has been a phenomenal success. We very quickly sold out all the tickets we put on sale, and people are clamouring for the final batch (to be released on Sunday morning). As for the show itself… well, we won’t know until it happens (15-17 October, the Horse Hospital, London), but I’d say it’s shaping up pretty well.

If you haven’t been able to get tickets to see the show, don’t worry – we’ll be performing more in the future, as well as recording a full album early in the new year and, just possibly, releasing a video of the show online. If you are coming to see the show, you might be wondering quite what to expect. Well, here’s the best I can do:

If you come expecting to see a band play a gig you’re in for a shock. Yes, there’s going to be a group of musicians standing in front of you. Yes, much of the time they will be playing songs. Yes, you’ll be able to buy drinks, sing along and clap if you want to. But we’re aiming to deliver something far more involved than a mere gig, to immerse you fully in the world we’ve created, to give you spectacle, to give you surprises. To give you the creeps.

If you come expecting to see a piece of musical theatre you’re also in for a shock. Yes, there are stories to be told. Yes, there are characters to be portrayed. Yes, we’ve put serious time and money into creating something visually compelling, with an outlandish selection of props, and costumes. But jazz hands there are not, rousing chorus numbers are not to be found, and no-one will be trying to convince you that it’s all good fun.

What is the show? The show is stories. The show is music. The show is the bastard love-child of an insane producer, a terminally morbid songwriter and a motley ensemble of musicians, actors, artists and layabouts, squeezed mercilessly into this world over the course of a gruelling, remarkable year, now tottering to its feet and vomiting out its antenatal nightmares into a basement where you can still see the stains of century-old horse blood.

Welcome to the show…

A most perfect invention that still kept immaculate time...

For the illustrations that show things happening directly on the train with the characters, we do shoots to make it easier on Lara. These are always great fun! One of our unreleased songs is called “The Case Of The Withering Eyes”, in which The Scientist asks The Doctor to give his eyes a quick checkup:

I stood in for The Doctor in this shoot...

...turned out okay though I think!

Use headphones or a giant soundsystem for full effect!

MP3

However, Book Of Sand 0.6 has now seen the light of day in the guise of the Clockwork Quartet forum.

A quick reminder of what the Book of Sand is: It’s a big old conversation tree that lets anyone create new nodes/posts/lines/branches (one of the hardest things has been finding and maintaining a consistent terminology) and allows you to traverse the tree following any conversation that takes your fancy, using indicators such as node popularity and creation date to help you decide which nodes to follow. Ed, from whose fertile imagination the concept sprang, describes it as an answer to the question: How can a million people have a conversation?

Simple, right? Well, it was in version 0.1. However, in the subsequent revisions we’ve added bookmarking, searching, a two-step captcha-ing registration process, spam- flags and an RSS feed, as well as several visual re-designs to optimise the way each node and its accompanying statistics are laid out on the page.

The potential applications of the BoS engine are pretty varied. It could be used for collaborative fiction, interactive fiction, user guides, info-bases (we use the site as its own bug report repository) and, well, anything that puts information into your standard hierarchical/taxonomic structure. Which was, until the introduction of tag clouds, pretty much how all knowledge was stored and how the world was analysed since the time of Aristotle (the ever-insightful Sinead Doyle pointed this out to me, and I’m sure would elaborate further on her related theory of knowledge if asked nicely).

However, in the first instance we’re using BoS as a forum. Why? Partially out of convenience – this idea came to fruition at roughly the same time as we started thinking “Wouldn’t it be nice if the band had a forum?”. But also because while BoS is still in its infancy we want to try it out with some sympathetic users who’re prepared to take an idea and play with it. Our experience of CQ fans so far is that they’re generally open to new ideas and won’t reject the whole concept just because it requires slightly more thought than a boring normal forum to start off with.

(Of course, having said that I’m almost inviting a bunch of angry, lazy CQ fans to fill up the site with casual abuse before hacking the site and using it to push evil viruses onto everyone new who visits.)

Anyway, the first Book is up. It’s not perfect. There are a few bugs we know about already, and probably several more that we don’t. We’re hoping that people will take the time to tell us about any that they find, as well as suggesting any bright ideas they have about how to make the forum better. But it’s working, and it’s there to be played with. So consider this an open invitation:

Come play in the sand.

Undulations & Ripples

Craters

Mountains

Water

Vegetation

Forest

Tribal Huts

Tribal Villages

Tribal Settlements

Agriculture

More Agriculture

Even More Agriculture

First Medieval Buildings

Medieval Towns

Medieval Cities

First Modern Buildings

Modern Cities

Futuristic Cities

The film is currently being edited by Bryan Crotaz… some teaser stills in a future post! I’ll be doing a few more posts on the day itself as well, and perhaps we’ll all eventually get to see the movie as well!

The Steamdrone (& friends)

It is to our great chagrin that the beast that is the steamdrone is powered on the inside by electronics. It was long the intention that it be actually coal powered, but producing a reliable, let alone useful sound proved elusive, so we shelved that particular avenue of research for a while.

For those of you that haven’t had the fortune to hear the cursed thing, let me describe what it sounds like. The sound of the Steamdrone is a cross between…

The pedals on a Wurlitzer organ...

A harmonium...

A hurdy gurdy...

And me playing a bugle...

...at the bottom of a long staircase!

These sounds are all magically combined via Ableton Live, and brought forth on command via one of these:

The Sacred Alesis, touched only by The Engineer and his apprentice

And I was going to post an MP3 of how it sounds, but The Engineer appears to have gone to bed without sending it to me, so you shall have to wait until tomorrow for that.

Fear not though, coal boiler experiments ARE continuing, and one day we’ll have a fully functioning acoustic steamdrone for your delight and delectation…

BoS is essentially a simplified forum/comment system, where users can create threads of text, by adding lines to other lines. Each line can have many child lines, so that if you start at the top you can read down any number of pathways. And if you want to add something, you simply create a new branch from anywhere. The idea is that multiple users can interact to create collaborative texts, or simply have conversations where they can choose to follow any path that takes their fancy. It’s simpler than most tree-structured comment threads, because each post is only a line of text, allowing you to see on screen the full content of all the ancestors of the current line, so that you can read them like directly off the page, and you can also see the full content of each direct child of the current line, so you can choose where to go next.

A screenshot of the prototype Book of Sand main page

In the above shot the ancestor lines are in green, the current line is in white, and the child line are in red. Note that each child line has a bunch of statistics in yellow to the right, and you can order the list by most of them using the blue links. This means that if you’re browsing a thread and you want to view, for example, the longest branch, you can easily set it so that the appropriate child is always at the top of the list. All ancestor and child lines are links, so you can easily traverse up and down the tree.

The system doesn’t add anything massively new – its functionality already exists in forums all over the place. What makes it interesting to me is what it removes. In the same way that Twitter took the concept of a social network site and threw away everything except the status update, deliberately making everything streamlined and simple, the Book of Sand is just a forum with all the non-essentials thrown away, leaving just the interesting stuff behind: what people actually write.

In a similar way, none of the PHP or SQL used for this site is particularly complicated. The PHP simply looks some stuff up in the DB depending on the Line ID in the query string and renders it on a page. Pretty much all the work it has to do, apart from the most basic login system, is add slashes to everything to prevent SQL injection. The DB is also pretty simple, but if there is any “cleverness” in the app, it’s here, because the trick is to make ancestor look-ups performant.

The obvious implementation would be to have a table that looks a bit like the following:

The problem with this is that while it’s compact, it’s a potential nightmare to  get ancestor information from. To find all the ancestors of each line you need to recursively look up every parent of every parent, which is not easy to do in a single query. And then suppose you want to know which of a line’s child lines has the most generations of descendents? You’d have to look recursively look up every child of every child, and since each line can branch into indefinitely many children, this becomes a massively resource-intensive procedure.

An answer to this would be to have extra columns on tLine that cache statistics like this. Every time you insert a line you call a sproc that updates the stats for every affected line. Which is fine, until multiple users want to use the site at once. Because while you’re calculating statistics you can’t have another process simultaneously updating things and calculating statistics, lest changes get double-counted. So you’d have to introduce locking, letting only one process access tLine at a time. Which would make inserting lines really slow when the site was busy.

The answer is to think of the tree of lines not as a series of one-to-many relationships, but as mass of many-to-many relationships. Instead of thinking that each line has one parent and many children, think that each line has many ancestors and many descendants. To represent this we remove li_parentId from tLine, and instead have a new table, tAncestry, that looks like so:

You’ll notice that there’s an extra column: an_stepsRemoved. This is needed because otherwise our tAncestry table wouldn’t be able to tell us the difference between a parent and a grandparent. With it, tAncestry can tell us the relationship every line has to every other line it is related to, meaning that to get our hands on all ancestors we just need to do a simple join on an_ancestorLineId back to tLine where an_lineId is the current line, and to get all children but not other descendants we do the same, swapping the ID columns and specifying an_stepsRemoved = 1.

Yes, this table does need to be updated every time a new line is added to tLine. But the great thing is that since we only add rows, never update them, it doesn’t matter if mutiple users are adding lines simultaneously. To add the appropriate lines to tAncestry all we need to do is find all the lines linking the parent line to its ancestors and duplicate them, incrementing an_stepsRemoved, then add one more line linking the new line to its parent. And because no amount of additions will alter the relationship of an existing line to its ancestors, concurrency isn’t an issue.

Plus, crucially, tAncestry makes looking up useful statistics a cinch. Want to know how many children a line has? Use:

The most recent date that the line gained a new descendent (at any level)?

The longest branch of descendent lines that a given line has?

Once you wrap all these up into subqueries of a view that your PHP can join to whenever it looks up a line, with appropriate indexes on the columns, performance stops being a worry. (So you can get on with prettifying the UI…)

The first use of Book of Sand will probably be to power the forum for The Clockwork Quartet’s website. Plus we’ll probably put it online as a standalone site just to see what people do to it. Once it’s live I’ll put up the source code for people to play with.

In my first meeting with Ed we discussed the sorts of instruments we wanted to use. We were both clear that we wanted plenty of percussion, but that it should be unusual stuff – i.e. no drums, cymbals or the like. Joe Schermoly has been hard at work putting together an “alternative” kit for us out of scrap metal. Then accordions were an obvious choice, and Ed convinced me that plenty of banjos were the way forward. I was initially keen on a trombone or equivalent, as brass and steampunk go together like, well, steampunk and brass. However, we realised that finding a trombonist might be tricky, and it’s not quite as versatile an instrument as we needed (unless it’s played really really well), so we compromised by including the Steam Drone.

But aside from the actual instruments the show is written for, it’s easier to talk about what we don’t sound like than what we do.

Despite my original intention was to write something that was primarily a standalone narrative show, it was never my intention that it sound like a piece of musical theatre. In fact the whole point of the project for me was to find a way of telling stories over the course of a series of songs without resorting to a set of tired theatrical clichés.

Neither did we want to sound like other bands that have dubbed themselves “steampunk”. While there are a few such bands out there, they tend to resort to sampled beats and synths, embracing the “future” element of retro-futurism rather more than the “retro”. Which, while some of these bands to their thing very well, doesn’t sound different enough to mainstream music to excite us. (Apologies to the several smaller non-electro steampunk bands out there – I am basing my assessment of the current steampunk music “scene” on what Wikipedia tells me are the largest bands. Trend-buckers are noted and admired).

Which isn’t to say our goal is to faithfully re-create the sounds that 19th century Londoners were moshing to. I have no desire whatsoever to reproduce the 1850 – 1930 music hall style, despite its narrative traditions and emphasis (before recording as a technology even existed) on live performance.

So what are we trying to sound like? Well, there are several goals. The first is to make songs that are singable. We want people who listen to our songs to find themselves humming them later. This is easy enough to do by itself (c.f. pop music in the 20th century), but made harder by the attempt to tell complete stories over the course of a few songs. More story = more lyrics = more complex tunes = harder on the ear. But it’s a balance we’re attempting to strike. So, for example, in The Watchmaker’s Apprentice there’s a standard verse/chorus structure, but the lyrics for each chorus are completely different, because we wouldn’t have fitted the whole tale into the song had we wasted time repeating words.

The second is to engage our listeners emotionally/emotively through the music as well as the lyrics. At the most basic level we use a lot of percussion, because human beings respond profoundly and instinctively to a beat. The songs move beyond (dull) four-chord repetitions, but there are repeated chordal structures, because something you can recognise is something you can relate to. The textures are as full as I can make them with the instruments available, and I try to write the arrangements so that, for example, if we suddenly modulate to a minor key you really feel it. You’ll have to wait for the next online releases/live shows to decide whether or not I succeeded.

The final goal is to unsettle our audience. Not alienate them, not hurt them, just take them slightly outside what they are used to, enough that they sit forward in their seats rather than back. So for example, a song we’re rehearsing at the moment, called “The Ineluctable Progress of Medical Science”, switches between 5 and 3-time, so that the occasional bar catches you off guard. Likewise, “Withering Eyes” (for which we are recording the last tracks on Monday) has a 16-bar “verse” section that keeps threatening to change to four different keys, while over the top the accordion and violin play melodies that are usually only a semi-tone apart (but it’s all tied together by a really singable melody over the top.

Perhaps that’s not a very clear description of the noise that we collectively make. But it shouldn’t be. If you could fully experience music just by reading about it, what would be the point of ears?

Have patience, good readers. More music will be released online soon, and our first run of shows in September will be announced in the near future. Until then, watch this. And subscribe to our mailing list.

But ahead of that, the arch and track for the camera is now built.  We ordered some cstom lengths of roller chain and sprockets and stepper motors to control the movement of the camera cart and the lights.  The stepper motor moves on a cylindrical series of electromagnets and through the fine adjustment of the percentages of power on the four opposing magnets, you can get the axle to step around in tiny steps, down to I think something like 2400 steps per revolution (so just a fraction of a degree).  We don’t need that kind of minuteness of scale but we are looking for a steady accurate movement of the camera along the arch and so the stepper motor will be able to do that by moving exactly 1/1200th of the circumference of the arch for each shot.  Luckily Bryan is handling all the electronics and programming, because i can only sit here and explain it to you, I can’t actually do it.

I’m also ordering materials for the landscape of our film.  We are making a homemade playdough recipe with flour, salt, oil, water and cream of tartar.  But we need to make about a cubic metre of playdough so may shopping list includes 80kg of flour, 50kg of salt and 20L of oil, and lots of food colouring.  Pretty fantastic.

We’re nearly there though and this weekend should be a blast!

Kirsten Fletcher, Bryan Crotaz, Eugenio Triana, Ash, Ed and myself have been doing the physical planning for the filmshoot.  The result of meetings is that we’re going to make this in as large scale as we can handle in our limited time and with our equipment.  To start with, our equipment being our bodies, there is only so far over a table that we can stretch to play with the landscape and so the table is 6ft wide.  And at six feet wide the camera can be as far as 8ft from the table and still capture the width and nothing but the width of the table.  So 8ft up means an 8ft radius, which is a 16ft  diameter, and so to give us some room to get the camera past the edge of the table on each end, the table is going to be 15ft long.  A 15ft long, 6ft wide table with a 8ft radius arc spanning the length of it!

The most difficult part is making the camera move in 4mm increments to give us 1200  shots around the circumference of the arch.  So Bryan is procuring a stepper motor which can be set to move in very precise increments and the motor will be axled out to cogs on either side and the cogs will fit into roller chain (bike chain) fitted over plastic pipe fixed into a constant arch of 8ft radius.  And the cart has a wheel system that rolls on the plastic pipe and keeps it moving steadily. Whew!  A lot and technical and a lot less room for error than it would be good to have when working on these tight time frames.  But the materials are on their way and the arch is in the process of construction.  I’ve also built the spidery looking cart to run over the pipes.

I won’t go on with too many other details tonight.  But I’ll write more later and as more of the construction gets completed.