text:
@implementation OVCHTTPSessionManager (PromiseKit)

- (PMKPromise *)GET:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self GET:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)HEAD:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self HEAD:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)POST:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self POST:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)POST:(NSString *)URLString
       parameters:(id)parameters
constructingBodyWithBlock:(void (^)(id<AFMultipartFormData>))block {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self POST:URLString
        parameters:parameters
constructingBodyWithBlock:block
        completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)PUT:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self PUT:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)PATCH:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self PATCH:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

- (PMKPromise *)DELETE:(NSString *)URLString parameters:(id)parameters {
    return [PMKPromise new:^(PMKPromiseFulfiller fulfiller, PMKPromiseRejecter rejecter) {
        [self DELETE:URLString parameters:parameters completion:^(id response, NSError *error) {
            if (error) {
                rejecter(error);
            } else {
                fulfiller(response);
            }
        }];
    }];
}

@end


smtp-notify is a daemon that subscribes to software events and Fault Management lifecycle events and produces email notifications based on a set of notification preferences that are stored in the SMF service configuration repository.
Email notification preferences are set using svccfg(1M).
This is an astring property that defaults to /. When set, the specified root directory will be used for all pathnames evaluated by smtp-notify.
By default, the body of the email event notification will be based on a set of localized message templates that are delivered with the Oracle Solaris operating system. smtp-notify will lookup the appropriate template (based on the event class) and fill in the template using elements from the event payload.
A user-supplied message body template can be substituted by specifying the msg_template notification preference. Refer to svccfg(1M) for more information about setting notification preferences on a per-service or per-event-class basis.
The message body template can contain the expansion macros listed below. These macros will be expanded by smtp-notify before sending the message.
The following command enables email notifications for Fault Management problem diagnosis events.
The following command lists all notification settings for Fault Management problem diagnosis events.


text:
Archive | 2011 music RSS feed for this section
January 2016 – upcoming gigs – Fortuna Pop Winter Sprinter and Repeater alt/indie/noisepop mini-festivals (and Hannah Marshall/Korbik Lucas playing a LUME slot) in London; Britten Sinfonia At Lunch across the east of England (with an Anna Clyne premiere); David Cohen and friends play magical-journey chamber music by Michael Nyman, Schubert and Gavin Higgins in Norwich
Happy New Year everyone. While I sort myself out, put the review of 2015 together and decide which approaches to take with 'Misfit City' this year, here's what I know about so far in terms of January shows. A couple of mini-festivals of indie pop/garage rock/punk/noise rock and indie folk in London; a lunchtime mini-tour of chamber music in London and the east of England; an afternoon of free improvisation in a Kentish Town record shop; plus one more interesting classical concert in unusual surroundings up in Norwich.
Several of the characters who showed up for the Arrivée/Départ II festival last month are also showing up for this next one: it's a similar aesthetic, and involves many of the same musical and professional friendships.
The 6th Annual Fortuna POP! Winter Sprinter (2016) (The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England, Tuesday 5th to Friday 8th January 2016, various times) – £10.45 (or £32.70 for four-day pass) – information – tickets
It's happening again… The 6th Annual Fortuna POP! Winter Sprinter 2016 is Go! Four nights, twelve bands, DJs… the perfect antidote to the post-Christmas blues with the creme de la creme of the Fortuna POP! roster – including former members of Broken Family Band and The Loves – plus special guests.
Tuesday 5th January – Steven James Adams + Simon Love + The Leaf Library plus DJ Paul Wright (The Track & Field Organisation).
Wednesday 6th January – Tigercats + Flowers + Chorusgirl plus DJ Paul Richards (Scared To Dance).
Thursday 7th January – Withered Hand (full band) + Evans The Death + Pete Astor, plus DJ Darren Hayman.
Friday 8th January – Martha + Milky Wimpshake + Bleurgh (a Blur covers band featuring members of Allo Darlin', Fever Dream, Night Flowers and Tigercats) plus DJs Sandy Gill & Karren Gill (Stolen Wine Social Club Night).
Overlapping the Winter Sprinter is something a little noisier, over in Shacklewell…
Repeater Festival (Bad Vibrations @ The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, Shacklewell, London, E8 2EB, England,
Thursday 7th to Saturday 9th January 2016, various times) – free entry – information
To break in the new year, Bad Vibrations will be putting on a 3-day residency of free-entry gigs at The Shacklewell Arms featuring a selection of garage, noise-rock and indie-folk bands. People playing include Taman Shud, The Wharves, Strange Cages, Virgin Kids, The Eskimo Chain, Honey Moon, Lucifer's Sun, Night Shades and St. Serf. The usual strip of soundclips and video is below.
A recent trip to Norwich (still a prime 'Misfit City' stomping ground, partly thanks to all of those hometown Burning Shed concerts in the past decade or so) brought me into touch with the next set of gigs. The classical ensemble Britten Sinfonia has close links with the east of England and is honouring that with its At Lunch mini-tours, which swing in a loose arc between Norwich, Cambridge and London, bringing sturdy classical repertoire plus new premieres with them. Here's information on the second of these tours (sorry, I missed the first one) which takes place mid-month:
Anna Clyne (photo by Javier Oddo)
Britten Sinfonia presents 'At Lunch Two'
St Andrew's Hall @ The Halls, St Andrews Plan, Norwich, Norfolk, NR3 1AU, England, Friday 15th January 2016 – £3.00 to £9.00 plus booking fee – tickets
West Road Concert Hall, 11 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP, England, Tuesday 19th January 2016, 1.00pm – £3.00 to £9.00 – information & tickets
Wigmore Hall, 36 Wigmore Street, Marylebone, London, W1U 2BP, England, Wednesday 20th January 2016, 1.00pm – £11.00 to £13.00 – information & tickets
Johann Sebastian Bach – Gott versorget alles Leben (from Cantata BWV187)
Domenico Scarlatti (arr. Salvatore Sciarrino) – Due arie notturne dal campo
Arvo Pärt – Fratres (for string quartet)
Johann Sebastian Bach – Seufzer, Tranen, Kummer, Not (from Cantata BWV21)
György Ligeti – Continuum
Anna Clyne – This Lunar Beauty (world premiere tour)
Johann Sebastian Bach – Tief gebückt und voller Reue (from Cantata BWV199)
Julia Doyle (soprano)
Maggie Cole (harpsichord)
Jacqueline Shave, Miranda Dale (violins)
Clare Finnimore (viola)
Caroline Dearnley (cello)
Marios Argiros (oboe)
A pre-occupation with texture permeates this programme, beginning with two arias from the grand master of counterpoint, J. S. Bach. Ligeti's 'Continuum' tests not only the limits of the soloist but also the exhilarating knife-edge between hearing individual notes and continuous sound. A world premiere from Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, Anna Clyne, whose music seeks to explore resonant soundscapes and propelling textures, completes the journey from the baroque to present day.
LUME, whose London jazz and free improvisation events I tracked during 2015, are continuing to expand their efforts. While they seem to have found themselves a more regular slot at the Vortex, early 2016 shows are taking place at assorted venues around the capital – galleries, shops, any suitable space. The first of these is in a heavy-duty experimental record shop in Kentish Town, which – although it's only a short walk or bus hop away from the 'Misfit City' flat – I've not noticed up until now. I should visit it and go through my usual masochistic experience of being intimidated by serried racks of music made by people I've not heard of before; or perhaps I should just go to this show.
Hannah Marshall + Kordik Lucas (LUME @ Electric Knife Records, 16b Fortess Road, Kentish Town, London, NW5 2EU, England, Saturday 16th January 2016, 1.30pm) – pay-what-you-like, £5.00 minimum
The first LUME gig of the year features a solo set from improvising cellist Hannah Marshall (whose collaborators have included Veryan Weston, Evan Parker, Lauren Kinsalle, Alex Ward and former Henry Cow members Tim Hodgkinson and Fred Frith), followed by a performance by the improvising duo Kordik Lucas duo (Slovakian analogue synth player Daniel Kordik and trombonist Edward Lucas, who also run the Earshots concert series and record label). This will be an in-store show so space is limited. There's not much more information available on the evening at present, so keep an eye on the LUME and Electric Knife sites for updates (if anything new shows up, I'll add it in here…)
David Cohen (photo by Daniel Herendi)
Finally, back to Norwich to drop in on a classical chamber music series assembled by acclaimed Belgian cellist David Cohen and assorted friends. Usually when I cover classical or modern classical concerts it's because they feature premieres of new pieces or intriguing new interpretations and juxtapositions. While this one does feature a premiere (Gavin Higgins' 'Howl') as well as a recent Michael Nyman string quartet from 2011, in this case I was intrigued by the venue – the John Innes Centre, a long-established plant and microbial research centre which lends its lecture theatre for these concerts. If you're of an intellectual, associative and site-specific mindset, you can listen to the structures in the music unfold while simultaneously considering that you're surrounded by the echoes of people thinking about – and unravelling the shape of – vegetable genomes.
Cello Con Brio 'Magical Journeys' (Norfolk & Norwich Chamber Music @ John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Colney Lane, Norwich, NR4 7UH, England, Sunday 17th January 2016, 7.30pm) – £1.50 to £25.50 – information – tickets
Michael Nyman – String Quartet No. 5 ('Let's not make a song and dance out of this')
Gavin Higgins – Howl (for solo cello & string quartet) – world premiere
Franz Schubert – String Quintet in C
David Cohen (cello)
Henri Sigfridsson (piano)
Corinne Chapelle (violin)
The Smith Quartet (strings)
Music performed by the ensemble on the other two days of the residency (15th and 16th January) includes chamber works by Brahms, Arensky, Schnittke, Beethoven and Paganini – the full listing is here.
More gig news next time, including shows by Laura Cannell, Ichi and Tom Slatter.
Tags: Alfred Schnittke, Allo Darlin', Anna Clyne, Anton Arensky, Arvo Pärt, Bleurgh, Britten Sinfonia, Broken Family Band, Cambridge (England), Cardiff (Wales), Caroline Dearnley, cello music, chamber ensemble, Chorusgirl, Clare Finnimore, Corinne Chapelle, Daniel Kordik, Darren Hayman, David Cohen, Domenico Scarlatti, duo music, Durham (England), Edinburgh (Scotland), Edward Lucas, Evans The Death, Fever Dream, Flowers, Fortuna Pop! (record label), Franz Schubert, Gavin Higgins, György Ligeti, Hannah Marshall, Hefner, Henri Sigfridsson, Honey Moon, Jacqueline Shave, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Julia Doyle, Kordik Lucas, listening to women, London (England), Lucifer's Sun, Ludwig van Beethoven, LUME (event), Maggie Cole, Marios Argiros, Martha, Michael Nyman, Milky Wimpshake, Miranda Dale, Niccolò Paganini, Night Flowers, Night Shades, Norwich (England), Pete Astor, premieres, Repeater Festival (event), Salvatore Sciarrino, Scared To Dance (record label), Simon Love, St. Serf, Steven James Adams, Stolen Wine Social Club Night (record label), Strange Cages, string quartet, Taman Shud, The Eskimo Chain, The Leaf Library, The Loves, The Smith Quartet, The Wharves, Tigercats, Virgin Kids, Where It's At Is Where You Are (record label), Withered Hand
Categories 2011 music, 2016 music, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, alternative pop, alternative rock, Baroque music, classical (Western art music), Classical music, cover versions, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, free jazz, garage rock, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, noise rock, orchestral music, pop, previews, psychedelic folk, punk rock, rock, Romantic music, singer-songwriter
Through the feed – free single/upcoming crowdfunder from The Duke Of Norfolk; Cardiacs and Knifeworld reissues; a new Tim Bowness album; disinterring lost Levitation
I can tell I've not kept my eye on the ball – nothing makes a person feel less alert than suddenly finding that three of his favourite musical projects (plus one new recent favourite and one older interest) are suddenly pouncing out new releases and. I step out for a moment, for another writing project, and someone moves all of the furniture around.
The Duke Of Norfolk: 'A Revolutionary Waltz'
So… let's start with news of fresh work from The Duke of Norfolk, a.k.a transplanted Oklahoman folkie Adam Howard, now resident in Edinburgh. He's currently offering a free single – A Revolutionary Waltz – in part-promotion, commenting "I am launching a Kickstarter project in two weeks to fund the making of a live video EP, and would like to give you this recording in the meantime. It's just a wee sonic experiment, but I hope you enjoy it!"
If you're wondering whether there's a Scottish Nationalist tie-in here, given recent political events in Britain, Adam's adopted hometown, and that beautifully sympathetic and country-tinged setting of Robbie Burns' Ae Fond Kiss on which he duets with Neighbour, think otherwise. In fact, this song is a darker cousin to An Evening Waltz (from his 2013 album 'Le Monde Tourne Toujours'): a foreboding meditation on the inexorable turn of fate's wheel, tying together three histories of power, betrayal and fall. Despite its timeless trad-folk lyric, Adam's busking roots (and the lusciously acoustic sound of much of his other material) it's also a rough-and-ready take on digital folk, either demo-rough or intended to display Adam's other roots in sound design. A clipped electrophonic waltz picks its way across a murky psychedelic smudge and a droning feedback pibroch: its characters sea-waltz to the grim, dry beat of a hand drum and a scattering of cowrie-shell percussion. It's well worth a listen. As for progress on the Duke Of Norfolk video Kickstarter campaign, it's probably best to keep tabs on his Facebook page.
Cardiacs: 'Guns'
Following the success of their double vinyl LP reissue of 1995's 'Sing To God' album, Cardiacs are doing the same with its 1999 follow-up, 'Guns'. While it's not the magnificent sprawler that 'Sing To God' is, 'Guns' offers a more concise take on the pepper-sharp 1990s Cardiacs quartet that featured Bob Leith and gonzo guitarist Jon Poole alongside the band-brothers core of Tim and Jim Smith. As Cardiacs albums go it's an even brasher beast than usual, hiding its gnarly depths under brass-balled upfront confidence and strong seasonings of glam-bang, pell-mell punk, whirring Krautrock, and jags of heavy metal looning.
'Guns' is also one of the most obscure Cardiacs works. Drummer Bob joined Tim on lyric duties, helping to turn the album's words into a dense hedge-witch thicket of allusion and play, in which typically naked Cardiacs preoccupations (dirt, wartime, suspicion, indeterminate life and death) are tied up into an almost impenetrable web, driven along by the music's eight-legged gallop. The fact that Tim and Bob were slipping in random borrowings from 'English As She Is Spoke', a notoriously bungled Victorian phrasebook with its own wonky and unintentional poetry, only added to the tangle.
You can pre-order the 'Guns' reissue here for end-of-June shipping. It's a single vinyl record, with no extra thrills or treats, but does come with the promise of beautiful packaging and pressing. You can expect to hear news on more Cardiacs reissues over the next few years. The current plan is to reissue the band's whole back catalogue on vinyl after years of exile (predominantly spent huddled exclusively on iTunes).
Meanwhile, see below for a taste of 'Guns' magnificent oddness. Here's the grinding drive of Spell With A Shell (which encompasses the lives of pets, the terror and wonder of transformation, and the cruelty, loneliness and confused loyalties of childhood). Here's a collision of outsider folk and reggae in Wind And Rains Is Cold (via a fan video of clips from 'Night Of The Hunter', from which Cardiacs frequently filch scraps of lyric). Finally, here's the scavenged, scratchy prog of Junior Is A Jitterbug with its prolonged and celebrated unravelling coda.
Cardiacs: 'Day Is Gone'
For those without turntables, there's been a relatively recent CD reissue of Cardiacs' 1991 EP 'Day Is Gone' – which I somehow managed to miss when it was first announced – and which includes the original three B-sides (No Bright Side, Ideal and concert favourite Joining The Plankton). This is from the pre-'Sing To God' lineup: another quartet but with Dominic Luckman on drums and, ostensibly, Bic Hayes on second guitar (prior to his explosive stints in Levitation and Dark Star, and to his current position etching dark psychedelic guitar shadings in ZOFFF).
Actually, since this was a time of shuffle and change in the band it's unclear as to whether Bic or Jon Poole is providing the extra galactic bangs and shimmerings on the EP. However, for Day Is Gone itself the attention should be on Tim Smith's grand bottle-rocket of a solo, capping what's both one of Cardiacs' most autumnal songs and one of their most headrushing cosmic efforts – a bout of November skygazing gone bright and vivid. See below for the original video in all of its low-budget saucer-eyed glory, and pick up the CD here.
Cardiacs: 'Heaven Born And Ever Bright'
Note also that a couple of other early-'90s Cardiacs recordings have made it back on CD in the past six months. 'Heaven Born And Ever Bright' (the parent album for Day Is Gone) shows Cardiacs at their brightest and bashing-est, but hiding a wounded heart. 'All That Glitters Is A Mares Nest' – the recording of a raucous 1990 septet concert at the Salisbury Arts Centre – was both the last hurrah of the 1980s lineup (with carousel keyboards, saxophone and half-a-scrapyard's-worth of percussion rig) and, for my money, is also one of the greatest live rock recordings ever made. See if you agree.
Cardiacs: 'All That Glitters Is A Mares Nest' (2014 reissue)
'Mares Nest' also made a welcome resurfacing on DVD a couple of years ago – see below for a typically quaking example of the band in action. It's also worth repeating that all of the profits from the recording sales continue to go towards palliative care and physical therapy for Tim Smith, who's still engaged in the slow painful recovery from his crippling stroke of 2008.
Knifeworld: 'Home Of The Newly Departed'
Meanwhile, Knifeworld – who feature an ex-Cardiac and, while being very much their own eclectic and tuneful proposition, carry a certain continuation of the Cardiacs spirit along with them – have collated early, interim and now-unavailable tracks onto a full-length album, 'Home Of The Newly Departed'. The seven tracks (dating from between 2009 and 2012) bridge the space between their 'Buried Alone: Tales of Crushing Defeat' debut and last year's tour-de-force 'The Unravelling'.
If you want to read my thoughts on the original releases, visit the original 'Misfit City' reviews of the 'Dear Lord, No Deal' and 'Clairvoyant Fortnight' EPs from which six of the tracks are taken. (I've just had a look back myself and discovered that I've previously described them as a band who could drag up exultation with their very fingernails, as starchildren weighed down by dark matter, as possessing "a knack of dissecting difficult feelings via swirling psychedelic sleight-of-hand" and as "an almighty and skilful art-rock mashup, with horns and bassoons poking out of it every which-way and strangely kinking, spiraling spines of rhythm and harmony locking it all together." I must have been pretty excitable, on each occasion.)
Alternatively, have a look at the videos below. Also, if you're in England during the end of May, the band (in full eight-person glory) are out on a short tour featuring the debut of new music.
Tim Bowness: 'Stupid Things That Mean The World'
With his erstwhile/ongoing no-man bandmate Steven Wilson going from strength to strength as a solo act, Tim Bowness also continues to concentrate on work under his own name – sleek, melancholy art-pop with a very English restraint, fired with a desperate passion and shaded with subtleties and regrets. His third album, 'Stupid Things That Mean The World', is due for release on July 17th; barely a year after his last effort 'Abandoned Dancehall Dreams' (one of my own favourite records of 2014).
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. 'Stupid Things That Mean The World' features the 'Abandoned…' core band of Tim plus his usual cohorts Michael Bearpark, Stephen Bennett, and Andrew Booker, and on spec sounds as if it'll be a smooth progression and development from the previous album. It also features guest showings from three generations of art rock (Phil Manzanera and Peter Hammill; David Rhodes and Pat Mastelotto; Colin Edwin, Bruce Soord, Anna Phoebe and Rhys Marsh) and string arrangements by art-rock-friendly composer Andrew Keeling.
Expect a typically Burning Shed-ish range of format options: the double CD mediabook edition (with companion disc of alternate mixes and demos including an unreleased no-man demo from 1994), and LP versions in either black vinyl or transparent vinyl (CDs included with each). Pre-ordering gets you a downloadable FLAC version of the 5.1 mix, plus the usual cute postcard. Sorry – I have no early tasters for 'Stupid Things…', but here's a taste of one of the slower, lusher tracks from 'Abandoned Dancehall Dreams' for the benefit of anyone who missed it last year.
Earlier on, while discussing Cardiacs, I briefly mentioned Bic Hayes and his time in Levitation. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them – or who weren't around in early '90s Britain to witness their brief, Roman candle of a run – they were a band who eagerly fused together an enormous sound, leashing and running with a frenzied and energized take on psychedelic rock, driving post-punk noise and earnest, distressed chanting from their singer, the former House of Love guitar star Terry Bickers. Sadly, they've become best known as the springboard by which Terry catapulted himself first into frontmanhood, then into the uncharted and finally (via some tortured decisions and unfortunate outbursts) into the obscure.
In truth, Levitation were an equal conspiracy of five. As well as Terry and Bic, there was Robert White (a baby-faced free-festival veteran and secret-weapon multi-instrumentalist, who'd later lead The Milk & Honey Band), an undersung alt.rock bass hero called Laurence O'Keefe and David Francolini, an astounding and slightly demonic drummer who could run the gamut from pattering rain to pneumatic drill in a single roll round his kit (and who, within Levitation, had the perfect opportunity to do so). Fuelled equally by inspiration, drugs and sheer hard work, they strived for three intense years while living on the outside of their skins, and briefly came close to making some very unfashionable sounds current again.
While they were certainly a "head" band – hippy punks who joined floating threads of British counter-culture, spontaneity and resistance together – it's vital to remember that Levitation were never your average festival band. They were never complacent, never entitled. More Yippie than trustafarian, they seemed (Bickers, in particular) to be desperately chasing revelations just over the rim of the horizon. Their ethos and experience was best summed up – or, more accurately, caught in a passing flare – in a lyric from their song Against Nature ), with Terry choking out "there is an answer, but I've yet to find out where" over a raging foam of guitars. Fingers (and not a few minds) got scorched along the way. In May 1993, it culminated in Terry's wracked, brutal self-ejection from the band – in a spurt of slogans and despair – during a concert at the Tufnell Park Dome, just a short walk from Misfit City's current home.
There have been some reconcilations since then (not least Bic, David and Laurence reuniting in the wonderful but equally short-lived Dark Star five years afterwards) but there have been no reunion, and no-one has ever seemed to want to go back. However, on Monday this week – Record Store Day 2015 – the Flashback label released the first Levitation music for twenty years – 'Never Odd Or Even', a vinyl-only EP containing three tracks from the band's lost 1992 album 'Meanwhile Gardens' (these being Never Odd Or Even, Greymouth and Life Going Faster). More information is here, although if you want to pick up one of the five hundred copies you'd better find your nearest participating British record store here: they might have some left. (There's an earlier version of the title track below, in perhaps a rawer form.)
I've described 'Meanwhile Gardens' as a lost album, which isn't strictly true. Although the record was recorded prior to Terry's explosive departure, there was life after Bickers, For just over a year, singer Steve Ludwin took on the frontman role; during this time the band took it upon themselves to partially re-work the album with Ludwin's vocals rolled out firmly over Terry's. The resulting version of 'Meanwhile Gardens' was only released briefly in Australia. Following the split of the Ludwin lineup and the final end of the band, it's always been regarded (rightly or wrongly) as something of a bastard appendix to the Bickers-era albums.
The happier news is that, following up 'Never Odd Or Even', Flashback are about to give 'Meanwhile Gardens' its own new lease of life with the active collaboration of the original lineup (including Terry Bickers). The album's original vocals have been restored, the songs polished to satisfaction and a final tracklisting agreed upon. Although former album tracks Graymouth and Life Going Faster have been ceded to the 'Never Odd…' EP, the 2015 version of 'Meanwhile Gardens' keeps four of the tracks familiar from the Ludwin version (Food For Powder, Gardens Overflowing, Even When Your Eyes Are Open and the vaulting soar of King of Mice) and adds five songs previously only available via bootlegs (Bodiless, Imagine The Sharks, Evergreen, I Believe, Burrows and Sacred Lover). Apparently, it'll be out sometime in "summer 2015" as a single CD and limited-edition double LP, each coming with gatefold sleeve and new artwork by original Levitation cover artist Cally.
It's probably best to keep track of progress on the 'Meanwhile Gardens' release here; but meanwhile here's the Bickers version of Even When Your Eyes Are Open (the last single the band released before he quit) and a bootleg-sourced version of the startling post-psychedelic stretchout Burrows – just to whet the appetite.
The Duke Of Norfolk online:
Cardiacs online:
Knifeworld online:
Tim Bowness online:
Levitation online:
Tags: Andrew Keeling, Andy Howard, Anna Phoebe, apocalyptic roars, Bic Hayes, Bob Leith, Bruce Soord, Cardiacs, Colin Edwin, David Francolini, David Rhodes, Dominic Luckman, Edinburgh (Scotland), glorious twitch, Jon Poole, Kavus Torabi, kinda blue, King Crimson, Knifeworld, Laurence O'Keefe, Levitation, London (England), Michael Bearpark, murmur to wail, no-man, Pat Mastelotto, Peter Hammill, Phil Manzanera, Porcupine Tree, previews (releases and events), Rhys Marsh, Robert White, Stephen Bennett, Steven Wilson, Terry Bickers, the buds and spawn of Cardiacs and Tim Smith, The Duke Of Norfolk (folk band), The Pineapple Thief, Tim Bowness, Tim Smith, William D. Drake, word salad
Categories 2009 music, 2011 music, 2012 music, 2015 music, art pop, art rock, crowdfunding campaigns, folk music, previews, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, reviews, single reviews
REVIEW – Preludes: 'The Moth' & 'The Swan' EPs, 2011 & 2012 ("the shadow of a melody")
Preludes: 'The Moth'
There's the shadow of a melody in the house, floating in the dusty air. It's coming from just around the corner, or maybe from up by the crumbling moulding.
Preludes is Matt Gasda (the sotto-voce poet who did most of the singing and keyboards in the ghostly riverbank psychedelics Bears in America) and his sister Emily. The Bears were a group so reticent and self-involved that listening to them was like spying on a set of old footprints, long-abandoned and filling with water. Some Preludes songs began life as Bears pieces before falling into this new form and flavour, so you can expect something of a family resemblance. Yet in their hypnotic and looping way, with their camp-fire canons and travelling-man guitars, Bears in America fitted (just) into the Americana bracket. In contrast, Preludes looks wistfully eastward, back towards Europe.
More specifically, Preludes capture a lost and fading atmosphere of East Coast grandeur: one which jealously guards its Old World connections, its cultural loftiness, its yellowing old money in a deadened and dreamy grip. While Matt may have relocated to New York City and settled in Brooklyn, Preludes seems to have set its heart further uptown. These songs emerge like a sigh haunting a shabby brownstone mansion on the Upper East Side, clinging to the scuffed books in its neglected library, or fluttering with a swirl of yellow leaves in its deep walled garden. It's not that these are wordy songs of privilege; instead, they're leisurely blurs of decaying luxury, drunk on elevated sensation and cut right back to free-drifting images of moons, flowers, loss and water, their stories dissolved. An encroaching darkness hovers around them, like time and chemistry eroding sepia photographs. At the same time, there's a rapturous quality to the music: the thrill of the last gasp, the final pirouette of memory.
'The Moth' EP, and its title track in particular, set up the Preludes recipe from the start – pianos (drowned in a flat and musty reverb), blurry-edged keyboard layers (in this case, a wavering swoon of fake strings), and a faint and faded rag of vocal yearning after something it can't quite describe, catching on whatever surrounds the moment. There's a touch of Goth in the mix, and more than a suspicion of Nico or Anthony Hegarty; but the obliqueness and the gauzy obscurity are all Matt's. Moonstruck, he murmurs soft, semi-operatic vocals in the backgrounds, muttering about cicadas and strange, longing transformations. Halfway along, a cheap drum machine begins to tap out a stately dance rhythm and Matt steps up to a new level of obscure, gently-impassioned reverie. ("And we'll walk along the opening geraniums… /The light of the moon. / Open your milk-white eyes… We will never grow so old.") It doesn't mean so much when you pin it down. Just a handful of fleeting images, lighter than anything. Open your hand and let it drift on this sigh of breath, however, and it flushes gently with life.
It's Emily Gasda who sings the out-of-focus waltz of The Moon And The Bonfires – sings in a small and distracted way over a softened skirl of goth keyboards; a spiralling distant dream of a barrel organ melody. Here's more obscurity (nightswimming and natural lights; the sense of a particular, autumnal time of year). Here's more plucking at floating, flowery images ("The violets of memory are growing in the water… / It's like a debt you share…") She sounds like a more peaceful version of Cranes' Alison Shaw. The Goth tambourine and the bass drum thud behind her sound like a lull in a noisy evening. Perhaps these songs are some kind of refuge.
As goosefeather-soft as the rest, the last song – Nightlight Child – begins as a ghostly lullaby. A muffled drum and music box playout becomes a throb while Matt and Emily sing together, and for a while they're Victorian in their magic and ruffles, their willingness to slip away into dream logic and wordplay and into ornamental fantasy. "Like water drawn from the well – moon drawn like a fish. / Nightlight child, it's all right. / Nightlight child come to life / and from the shell alight. /A starry, starry night." Gradually the lullaby play fades seamlessly into surreal and transforming fable: images turn macabre (moth eyes, floods rising from the throat to drown) and innocence and horror overlap. Unwinding ourselves from this particular gauze is less easy.
Preludes: 'The Swan'
Five-and-a-half months later (swimming back into view with a second EP, 'The Swan') Preludes are just as enclosed and enrapt in their consumptive old-world decay. "Snow falls in Central Park, / and for a day your fever drops," sings Emily on a song which also coos "love is so cold" and reminisces – with a quiet, absorbed bliss – about kissing frozen hands. There's never a suggestion that there's any danger involved here, or a direct flicker of death. That particular disquiet just seeps into the gap that's left for it.
In general the themes of sleep, death, illness and wasting-dream simply blush gently through the EP's songs, each of them thinning the walls between experiences. The strangest of these is the title track, wrought with a chilly expressionism and drifting symbols. "I love the sorrow of your voice / and the wreckage of the old days" Matt muses, beneath a cloudy Blue Nile synth pad (a mirage of traffic in the evening sky) and a funerary piano line (a shard of dusty porcelain from a lost urn). Death and revival blur together ("you're enclosed in the petals / made of snow, / born up into the clouds like ash") in a way that's as much phoenix as swan. "I'll wait by the river / for the ice to tear itself up," promises Matt, as the ritual works its way to conclusion. "Your blood will germinate the spring." Over a minute of silence at the end of the song eases the point home.
On Sleepy Eye'd (backed by an enthusiastic music-box twinkle and lambent synth), Emily enjoys a much more innocent dream – "We'll tear up the feathers of the stars / and make our bedding on the moon… / Take my hand, we'll go skating on the glass, / catch fireflies with our hands." For a while, Preludes sound as if they've slipped into 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' and the air of rapt surrender lightens a little.
It's only on The Well that brother and sister find out what happens when they write and sing together. Here, Emily sounds eerily like Mama Cass (moving almost imperceptibly from her previous ghostly solipsism to a kind of centred passion) while Matt murmurs an ashy, barely-there harmony. Somewhere in there is an ancient Scottish air, missing its drone but making do with a broken-limbed piano line and rising string-synth bleeds. "And the love you held in your hands like a bird / is waking up again." sings Emily, cupping revival in her voice. "I will go down to the well / draw up water in my hands. / Tell all, all the dead / the world is now beautiful – / stop the clocks and open the windows. / We can't understand."
By the end of the song, it seems as if those strange arrested Preludes atmospheres might finally be breaking down, offering release. "Now I feel time as it flows / like the melting snow." sings Emily. Somewhere out of earshot a gate is opening, a clock starting, a breath deepening.
Preludes: 'The Moth' & 'The Swan'
Preludes (self-released)
Download-only EPs
Released: 21st August 2011 ('The Moth') & 8th February 2012 ('The Swan')
Get them from:
Bandcamp – 'The Moth'; 'The Swan'
Preludes online:
Tags: Bears in America, cheap drum machines, drift and float, Emily Gasda, head spins gently, Matt Gasda, men and women singing together, New York City (USA), singing reveries, songs that sound like dusk
Categories 2011 music, 2012 music, alternative pop, alternative rock, ambient music, ambient pop, dream pop, electronic, EP reviews, experimental music, mumblecore, pop, post-punk, reviews, synth pop
REVIEW: The Fierce & The Dead: '10×10' single, 2011 ("post-glum")
The Fierce & The Dead: '10×10′
So they're trying on some sparkle, now? The last time I heard Matt Steven's improv-rock trio they were lurking and cruising somewhere in the loose territory between bluesy prog, smoky space music and easygoing math-rock. They were promising, but they weren't upsetting much: their initial statement was more of a drawl than a grand pronouncement. However, having shambled forward and established themselves, The Fierce & The Dead are getting down to more serious play. Ideas that were only hinted at last time, down in the small details, now wriggle forward.
For starters, 10×10 itself scrunches up and throws away the idea that this band is just Matt Stevens and pals. Bass player Kev Feazey, a solemn support musician on the band's opening shot, steps up and all-but-leads the band on their second. His slithering springy bass line, full of New Wave funk, recalls both turn-of-the-'80s Talking Heads and long-lost London math/surf rockers Kenny Process Team: gentle arty neurosis, pinned to a love of groove. A spluttering, stuttering synth break adds a raw danceable edge.
Meanwhile, Matt is quietly at work all over the background – catching a surf of noise in the distance, opening out the landscape beyond with torch-beams of sustain guitar. Some looping, arpeggiating guitars dragged along after the bassline draw their drive from a long-gone, edgier New York: skitchers grabbing velocity from a speeding car, or Robert Fripp's cyclic proto-'Discipline' Manhattan patterns. There's even a dash of rave dynamics as a delicate, dewdrop-fine piano break spins us around for a look at the dawn. In the cloud of "post"-widget names that swarm around art-rock music these days, pick "post-glum".
The second track, Foreign Languages is even livelier. A blues-rock grind on bass over mechanical drums; spankingly sharp fingerpicked guitar and a bubbling, ground-shimmying feel of dub.An old 'Galaxian' game in the corner of the studio seems to have joined in too, adding zips and lassoos of gurgling analogue sparkle. There's a tremendous sense of free play – old familiar elements reshuffled and re-zested, and looked at afresh. Since 'Part 1', The Fierce and the Dead have recharged their time machine, and now skip merrily between the dreamy psychedelia of the '70s and the boggling pluralism of the post-punk '80s with ease and a yen for reinvention. Where next?
Download-only single
Released: 4th April 2011
Buy it from:
The Fierce & The Dead online:
Tags: gemlike sparkle, groove, London (England), Matt Stevens, The Fierce & The Dead
Categories 2011 music, alternative rock, math rock, post-punk, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, reviews, rock, single reviews
REVIEW – Elephant: 'Allured/Actors' single, 2011 ("a slow jam that's strayed")
Elephant: 'Allured/Actors'
"Oh, hello, / I'm a never-ever-let-it-show – / But I know that you know. / Maybe I should let it, let it show…"
On past evidence Elephant have a knack for drawing us in while admitting to little. Their debut single mingled dream-pop with reggae and industrial chill, and cold electronics with fairy-tale flashes. They ride on a solid understanding of black pop, yet constantly swerve away from it into Euro-cool whiteness. They readily confuse, and they excel in oblique feelings – perhaps they can't help it. Amelia's blank singing, their aloof and obscure post-punk textures, their taste for quick-cut lyrics and surreal, visual word-imagery… while their work so far is memorable, all of it's a conundrum. Yet for a moment, on this second single, everything is clearer.
With only the subtlest indie-pop bleachings and dream-pop shadings, Allured is an R'n'B piano ballad: plain and simple. There's the deep, minimal support of bass. There's the gaps, space and swat of a heavy-lidded slow sex-beat; the sparse flick of tambourine like a shimmying skirt-fringe. Essentially it's a slow jam that's strayed out of the dance club in its heels and skintights, taken a wrong turning past the taxi rank, and been painlessly swallowed by Elephant's dreamy way of doing things. In the video we watch as voyeurs as Amelia and Christian languidly nuzzle and smooch each other – lengthily, and uninterruptedly. Either they're answering that "are-they-aren't-they?" question that's hung around Elephant since the beginning, or they're very committed to the world of this particular song.
Whether Elephant have simply been infected by R'n'B's outright and intoxicated sexuality, or whether they've swallowed it deliberately, is open to question. I suspect the latter. Few areas of twenty-first century pop haven't rolled over and submitted to R'n'B's sweaty vigour and its gobby, blinged-up sex'n'suss'n'opportunity confidence. While some diehard indie-poppers might still scream and scrub it off; or cling to older schools of soul, Elephant see a good thing and slurp it up, embracing and engulfing it in their turn. So here they are, reaching out greedily into the wide-open mainstream while happily sunk in obsession, drunk with sensuality.
Only the lyrics retain that peculiar Elephantine distortion. Amelia rolls the words around on her tongue, dabbing them with glottal stops and her own strange short-circuiting shifts of accent or syntax, whether wriggling into a tangled lick of coyness, circling orgasm ("our own anatomy, so I find the path – my brain / it carousels instantly, drives me to insane,") or swimming in a stupor of surrendered identity ("I dreamt he'd written me… He took me away, crossed me away from the crowd…") By rights, this clotted wordplay should cripple the song. Instead it lolls sexily across the beat, as if on the brink of falling out of bed.
Then the B-side – Actors – throws us right off the scent. Same old Elephant; entirely different set of clothes. Rather than the wallow of bass and beats, here are acoustic guitars on the strum, a skinny ice-rink organ, and a dose of fast-paced pop soufflé which chuffs around its drum track like a toy steam train. It's a tune for people in mini-dresses to run around Paris to, or chase summer bicycles through Spanish Harlem. Once again, Amelia's dazed delivery and tangled string of lyrics ensure that it keeps the Elephant stamp.
It's anyone's guess as to what she's singing about this time – "hop around aimlessly, simply surrender to time. /Animations out past under the feet, imitating a shadow spine." Somehow the words fall into place as she sings of paying the rent "with a monogram eye" or murmurs about "the highest apple in the tree." Perhaps, like many of the best and sexiest club hook-ups, it's just a happy accident.
Memphis Industries, MI0193S/D
vinyl 7″/download single
released: 18th July 2011
Memphis Industries.
Elephant online:
Tags: Elephant (pop group), head spins gently, listening to women, London (England), multi-instrumentalists, songs that sound like dusk, songs that sound like summer, word salad
Categories 2011 music, alternative pop, alternative rock, dream pop, pop, R&B, reviews, single reviews, synth pop
Demo reviews – The Many Few: assorted Soundcloud demos ("as cosily misshapen as candle stubs")
The Many Few don't exactly do precision. One guitarist slops acoustic rhythms around like a drunken waiter losing control of a tray. The other doodles away cheerfully, or hiccups free-improv dribbles in a corner. Sometimes both of them land in the same song. Meanwhile, two singers are jostling together: Johnnynorms (he of the small, dry voice) and Melissa Wyatt (who aims for creamy breathiness and theatrical intimacy but ends up kittenish and blowsy). The drummer pins everything together, but worries and wobbles over anything more complex than a mid-paced chuff-along. The bass guitar stumbles vaguely after the other instruments, distracted by a nearby jazz gig.
Unless they're deliberately deconstructing their pop, or unless they record only while cheerfully drunk (both of which are possible), The Many Few are a thorough fucking shambles, and I think they know it. Do you think I'm going to bury them for it? Hardly. That tumbledown, lopsided indie-pop stagger is integral to their approach and charm. You can toss in those usual Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart comparisons (you know, the ones applied to almost any wayward indie band who ramble outside the beat a little) but The Many Few are far too friendly and floppy for that. In their cheery, ramshackle way, they sound more like '90s nouveau-skifflers Zuno Men… if the latter had been stuck in a house-share with a teenaged Kate Bush and spent most of their time half-cut.
You could easily imagine them all sprawled over a tatty sofa – arguing over the washing-up, loving each other and picking over the usual daily scams of living together. You can imagine them hurrying off, at any opportunity, to the local pub for the kind of lock-in which ends in howls of laughter and wrestlings over a battered old board game. I wouldn't want to be the one to try getting them organized. It would only spoil it. This scraggy comfort must have been all over the making of this enjoyable batch of songs, which they call "armchair surrealisms" and I'd call animated scrawls, as cosily misshapen as candle stubs.
On the irresistible Catching, Johnnynorms repeatedly starts off on a story, only for Melissa to barge in and take it over. As all of the stories are about naïve men making comically doomed attempts to win over smarter women, this is only appropriate. Wonky high-life guitar ambles around like a cheery woodpecker as Melissa teases "I'm sorry but she had a child when she was young / and she's not catching that from you", before announcing her intent of fleecing some other poor bloke for all he's got.
The upbeat Sweep and Swipe (part genial commuter-belt revolt, part kid's TV song) bumbles through work, procrastination and rebellion in a very British jumble. There's a sense of urgent feelings swaddled up and hidden under a brittle, chirpy exterior: something which this song shares with another, Typical British Weather (itself tipsy, woozy and smiling a crooked smile in the rain). It's left to the messy, chunky power-punk of Meet my Clone to sideline the shambling and the evasions via dirty guitar, a tight irritated momentum and the band's most ingenious idea. Johnnynorms and Melissa wrangle over the doppelganger relationships of people grown close in appearance and habit, but not feelings: "Eye to eye you'd think we were the same. / But it's me that feels all the guilt, and rage, and love, and shame."
Past the 18th Town is entirely different. A haunting acoustic dirge touching (in the briefest of sketches) on transient people, it follows them as they move from rented room to rented room. As old roots fade and new roots become stunted, they lose their ability to recognize and return love. Tingles of guitar harmonics tickle the nerves while the band capture a world of disengagement in simple, telling lines like "send the letters on, / send them back unknown." It suggests that the ghost of a cold and lonely wind, blowing under that gap in the door, sometimes haunts The Many Few's sprawling house party.
The Many Few: assorted Soundcloud demos
Soundcloud (no catalogue numbers)
Free download tracks
Released: various dates in 2011
Free download from Soundcloud
The Many Few online:
Tags: London (England), men and women singing together, The Many Few, things fall apart
Categories 2011 music, alternative pop, alternative rock, music downloads for free/cheap/pay-what-you-like, post-punk, rock
REVIEW – Elephant: 'Ants' single, 2011 ("somewhere between love-gone-wrong and epilepsy")
Elephant: 'Ants/Wolf Cry'
Band named after large thing actually sounds small. Single named after tiny things suggests that small-sounding band (named after large thing) could go massive. Sometimes I love pop's ridiculous anti-logic.
Elephant are two. Christian Pinchbeck coaxes noises out of computers and wrangles chittering textures from guitars. Amelia Rivas plays old sounds on modern keyboards while swimming and sighing distractedly through the middle, avoiding eye contact. It's synth-pop, allegedly, but it's also nothing quite so obvious. Amelia and Christian may or may not be a couple, but that's not clear either. With Elephant, not much is.
Ants is Elephant's debut single, and it spends its three minutes cunningly, surprisingly persuading various things that shouldn't work together to cosy up and make something which does work. A gentle reggae bounce, a dribble of whiter-than-anything psychedelic guitar direct from Cocteau Twins; a roughed-up reedy synth figure like a bass accordion with hiccups. As for what the song might be about, it's somewhere between love-gone-wrong and epilepsy; like David Lynch reimagined as lovers rock. "I'm tired and I'm bruised for you," Amelia murmurs, moping elegantly across the backbeat. "The war that I fought made my body contort… I'm down in the black, and I'm blue."
When we talk of indie-pop being sickly, we usually mean that it lacks power. Here, sickliness is power. Unease and disease blend together, reality is erased by symptoms, and experience is somehow amplified by the giddiness and blank alarm. Throughout, there are references to buckling knees; to floating and amnesia and jump-offs; to falling to the ground or into song. Even the chorus avoids clarity in favour of hallucinatory warp ("Ants now scurry on the floor, / I just can't remember before,") with all perspective thrown right out-of-whack. Yet Elephant snatch a victory from these flashes of confusion and disaster, sheathing them into a subtle, catchy, play-it-again heartbeat of song; a cool, black-and-white flicker of distress call.
While Ants cloaks strangeness under bits of spooky washed-out reggae ballad, its flipside Wolf Cry goes for out-and-out surrealism in a stream of Bunuel electro-punk. Amelia sings of seasons, seafarers and parted lovers. Deeper into the song, she jinks these acid-folk fairytales into blurred dreams of power struggles, throwing out images of hunky aristocrats or "militants on the roof." Everything hangs together – precariously – over Christian's alienated instrumental bonework: a flat backdrop of flat echoing skitters, deep red bassquakes, ghostly chords and spray-can snare hits. As the song riffles balefully through its repertoire of cinematic flashes, impressions build and cut ("the ticking of a clock, jumps to interior,") or flirt, archly, around games of obscurity ("we all wear a mask to a fellow passer-by.")
Ultimately, Wolf Cry comes apart in the fingers if you squeeze too hard (the strange syntax, the dodging of plot, their mingling of seduction and avoidance) in much the same way that the story of Ants comes to us half-melted. Elephant have a knack for this kind of anti-logical play, squeezing into the gaps in the story. Besides, they've already demonstrated that they're masters at magicking something coherent out of disorientated fragments – not least via a fine mournful tune or two. Evasive or not, they're very much in the room. I suspect that I'm going to go on talking about them.
Elephant: 'Ants'
Memphis Industries, MI0172S
released: 17th January 2011
Tags: Elephant (pop group), gemlike sparkle, head spins gently, listening to women, London (England), multi-instrumentalists, songs that sound like dusk, word salad
Categories 2011 music, alternative pop, alternative rock, dream pop, pop, reggae, reviews, single reviews, synth pop

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Stanley Johnston
Freedom of the Press or Treason?
By Grant Sanger, M. D.
Vol. 103/9/895
On 7 June 1942, The Chicago Tribune published an article entitled "Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea." Identical articles, with different headlines, appeared the same day in the New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald. At the time these newspapers comprised what was called the McCormick-Patterson empire.
For those readers under 30, the United States was at war with Japan; the Battle of Midway was still on; and the USS Yorktown (CV-5) was still afloat.
An investigation revealed that the article was written by a Tribune correspondent, Stanley Johnston, and filed from Honolulu. There had been a serious error when, some months before, he had not been asked to sign accreditation papers as a war correspondent attached to the Navy. This freed him from submitting for censorship everything he wrote.
It was fairly obvious to those who read the article carefully that a Japanese naval code had been broken. (U. S. Naval Intelligence called it JN-25-C.)
All of this is not new , but 35 years later at least three different authors have asked , and at the same time have told us, how Stanley Johnston did it!
On 9 July 1971 , on the "Op-Ed" page of The New York Times, Clayton Kirkpatrick, editor of The Chicago Tribune, wrote that Johnston's "remarkably accurate deductions," from recent experiences in the Battle of the Coral Sea (3-6 May 1942), enabled him to tell readers in great detail the complex Japanese plan of attack on the Aleutians and Midway Island! Also, he returned to Chicago to write the story!
Then-Commander Edwin T . Layton, senior intelligence officer for the Pacific Fleet in 1942, placed Stanley Johnston in USS Saratoga (CV-3) which was just emerging from the San Diego repair yard and was rushing to help in action at Midway. In a U. S. Naval Institute "Oral History," Rear Admiral Layton relates that someone posted on the wardroom bulletin board a dispatch from Admiral Nimitz which revealed Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's operation plan for the attacks on the Aleutians and Midway Island. It was there Stanley Johnston acquired his information!
Philip Knightley, in his book, The First Casualty (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), finds Stanley Johnston in a naval transport en route to California. Somehow he put all the pieces together while the Battle of Midway was in progress after his arrival in Chicago.
So much for revisionist historians.
Back in Washington was Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a former publisher of The Chicago Daily News, who had no love for Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of The Chicago Tribune. The wheels of law were set in motion, and on 7 August 1942, the U. S. Attorney General, Francis Biddle, announced that a Grand Jury would be convened in Chicago to investigate the facts of Johnston's article.
William D. Mitchell was chosen to head the government's legal staff. He was the first U. S. Solicitor General to become Attorney General, having been appointed to the former position in 1925 and the latter in 1929.
For five days, the editors of the three McCormick-Patterson newspapers and Stanley Johnston were called to testify.
In March 1959, this author was fortunate to meet the late Adlai Stevenson. I asked him what he knew of the Stanley Johnston article since he had been a special assistant to Secretary Knox from 1941 to 1944. Stevenson said that Stanley Johnston told the Grand Jury that when he abandoned the mortally wounded USS Lexington (CV-2) in the Coral Sea, on 4 May 1942, he was picked up by a motor whaleboat from the USS New Orleans (CA-32), along with 580 others. After dropping the survivors in Noumea, the New Orleans proceeded to Pearl Harbor, where she arrived on 26 May 1942. Being a war correspondent, Johnston had free run of the ship and was not deposited in Noumea.
One day while going to the bridge, he passed through the captain's cabin, where an open message lay on the desk. Johnston told the Grand Jury he did not touch the message, but memorized its content. This was the basis for his article.
Rear Admiral Theodore S. Wilkinson, then Director of Naval Intelligence, used his influence and power to prevent any naval officer from appearing before the Grand Jury. Hence, the jury knew nothing about the breaking and using of a Japanese naval code. William D. Mitchell, therefore, had to tell the press on 20 August 1942 that "no violation of the Espionage Act had been disclosed."
On 31 August 1942, Representative Elmer J. Holland stated on the floor of the House of Representatives:
"A bill of indictment means a public trial, Mr. Speaker. A public trial means public testimony. And public testimony in a court of law, with skilled counsel representing the defendants, means that military secrets, however vital, must be revealed if they are relevant to the defense of those accused.
"It is public knowledge that the Tribune story, published also in the New York Daily News and the Washington Times-Herald, tipped off the Japanese high command that somehow our Navy had secured and broken the secret code of the Japanese Navy.
"That is a priceless advantage in war—to know your enemy's plans through your knowledge of his code.
"Three days after the Tribune story was published, the Japs changed their code."
We now know that whatever changes the Japanese made in their code JN-25-C were neither major nor severe, for we continued to read successive generations of that code to the end of the war.
Clayton Kirkpatrick, in the aforementioned article in The New York Times, wrote, "The Tribune has never wavered in its conviction that the controversial story violated no law and that publication was consistent with a newspaper's privileges under the First Amendment. Only a distortion of history could support the insinuations that the newspaper violated national interests."
One might well ask, "Where were the Japanese spies?" If there were any in the United States in the summer of 1942, they would not or did not read The Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Washington Times-Herald, or the Congressional Record!
At the end of the war, the Statute of Limitations had expired, and no further legal action was desirable or possible. However, I agree with the late Judge Thomas D. Thacher, Solicitor General 1930-1933, that if the Navy had seen fit to present evidence to the Chicago Grand Jury in August 1942 on the background of how we got Admiral Yamamoto's plan of operation, those responsible for the article would have been indicted for treason.
Robert R. McCormick
Reporter Johnston was on board the Lexington when she was hit and sunk during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Johnston and all others in the carrier were rescued by the New Orleans, pictured, where he read the classified message that became the basis for his article.
Grant Sanger
Digital Proceedings content made possible by a gift from CAPT Roger Ekman, USN (Ret.)


text:
Did our suffragettes fire up the town?
Peggotty
At the ready: Yarmouth Fire Brigade of old, poised to tackle blazes like the timber yard and Britannia Pier ones in 1913 and 1914. Picture: MERCURY ARCHIVE
Nowadays, a tabloid newspaper's eye-catching front page headline would scream something like: "Flamin' Women!"
Seeking the right to vote: suffragettes campaigning on the Market Place before the First World War. Picture: MERCURY ARCHIVE
A century ago, suspected suffragette arson attacks on three Great Yarmouth targets causing huge damage were reported in detail by a local weekly paper, albeit tucked away under an insignificant headline on inside pages.
This year events nationwide mark the centenary of women receiving the right to vote.
In 1913 "one of the biggest fires in living memory" engulfed the Southtown Road timber yard of Palgrave Brown, the Yarmouth and Gorleston Times reported. Most of the huge stacks of deals in the riverside premises were destroyed.
The heat was so intense that river traffic was suspended. Impassable Southtown Road was closed. Nearby houses and business premises were in great danger. Berthed steamers delivering timber cargoes hastily cast off to seek fresh berths upriver.
Timber! Palgrave Brown's riverside Southtown Road yard in the 1990s. Picture: MERCURY LIBRARY
As high timber stacks fell, blazing deals pitched into the river, "floating like burning islands". Some fell on to floating logs seasoning in the river, igniting them.
The Yare was crowded with the herring fleet in port. Quays were lined with vessels discharging cargoes, many of them flammable. A lightship was towed to safety. Two barges tried to pass but the heat caused their furled sails to smoke and their paintwork to be hugely blistered, but the port tug George Jewson, which was helping firemen, hosed the vessels down.
Efforts to prevent nearby homes catching fire succeeded, but some suffered cracked and broken windows. People using Boundary Road to bypass the inferno were peeved when a landowner imposed a charge!
Said the Press: "The origin of the fire is unknown and considerable mystery is attached to it as the outbreak originated in the very centre of the yard."
The port tug George Jewson which helped tackle the timber yard blaze in 1913. Picture: PETER ALLARD COLLECTION
Anonymous postcards received by the town clerk, police and a local newspaper claimed that suffragettes were responsible. The following night three Yarmouth Golf Club greens were damaged, and numerous cards were found on the links bearing suffragette messages, including claims to have ignited the Palgrave Brown timber yard.
A suffragette newspaper plus seven cards were discovered, three declaring: "No vote, no sport, no peace, no property is safe. Give women the vote!"
Another confessed: "The timber yard was fired by us. There is no mystery about it. Oil was poured over the planks and a candle left burning in a celluloid soap-box."
The local Press reported: "This is the first occasion Yarmouth has suffered any damage at the hands of the militant suffragettes and the incident has evoked considerably indignation. The cards were evidently written by some educated person, judging by the writing, grammar and punctuation."
As for the Britannia Pier Pavilion, recently rebuilt after fire gutted it, the replacement was razed to the ground, six months after the timber-yard inferno.
The seaward end was well ablaze, flames fanned by strong winds, at 4am when the motor and horse fire engines arrived, summoned by two night workers on the pier. One employee had heard a loud bang, the other saw the new tea-room behind the pavilion a-flame.
Despite their prompt arrival, firemen quickly realised that extinguishing it was well-nigh impossible, and it was obvious to them that the pavilion was doomed.
Fanned by the strong breeze, flames licked the pavilion walls and swiftly became a raging furnace. Intense heat prevented firemen from getting within striking distance, so they concentrated on saving buildings nearer the pier entrance.
As the inferno spread rapidly towards the landward end, the pavilion was swiftly demolished.
In saving that landward end, firemen were fortunate because charred pieces of wood blown on to the Parade and adjacent roads threatened the two hotels at the bottom of Regent Road, but any danger was averted.
A postcard bearing a customary suffragette legend was found by a lad on the beach under the pier, but nothing suspicious was found on the structure itself.


I'll be using purifyCSS for that purpose. It has plugins for the most popular task runners and module bundlers - Grunt, Gulp and Webpack. Even though, you might think that Webpack will be the tool of choice that is not necessarily true. Because of the fact that internal mechanics of Angular CLI are hidden, it might be a good idea to use a separate task runner like Gulp or Grunt to avoid ejection.
Under the hood purifyCSS reads content of file (HTML/JS/PHP/etc) and returns only the used CSS. Saying that, in a case of Angular, we need to check all *.ts and *.html files for used CSS classes and remove the unused ones.
As I already mentioned, in my specific case, purifyCSS was able to reduce the bundle by ~60.2%.
Since grunt is used as a primary build tool for many production codebases I think it's worth to implement the same functionality using that build tool.
Implementation notes: considering that Angular CLI dynamically adds generated hash to js files during the production build and grunt-purifycss plugin can't read/write dynamic file names we have to use separate variable cssSource for that purpose.
As you might notice, in both cases the same options object was used for gulp and grunt task. You might read about it more in the official documentation.
In my case, too much CSS was removed and that's a reason I needed to explicitly whitelist CSS classes that did contain transition and dimmer string.
In this example, I had a giant framework where I was using only small fraction of it which made it possible to decrease CSS size by 60.2%. However, in some other project, where CSS is written from scratch, this number should be really small, probably close zero. In any case, it's worth to try it as it doesn't require too much effort to implement this functionality.
In addition to that, this trick can also be applied to any type of framework, such as React, Vue, etc. or even non-framework Multipage Applications, CMSes as it builds on top of framework's internal build pipeline.


This topic contains 280 replies, has 81 voices, and was last updated by Mike 7 hours, 49 minutes ago.
Just some odds and ends currently. . . waiting for a delivery of 1/2400 Pre-dreadought fleets to arrive, and to sum up the courage to begin a 10mm Austrian Army.
1. 10mm Napoleonic Lancers and dragoons- all primed for painting.
2. 6mm Support elements for a BKCII Panzer Division in 1941- 4 Pak 38 and 3 81mm Mortars done, The Panzerjagers just need basing.
3. last squad of 15mm Albertine Regulars for AVBCW bolt action.
To model the effect of Nuclear weapons on the wargaming table, apply jerry can of fuel to board, light match and stand well back.
Lovely cavalry William — and I love what you posed them on!
You noticed Henry, thanks for your kind comments.
Just for you. All waiting to be painted.
Thats a lot of Cav !!!
This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Nick the Lemming.
Nick — I'll be really interested to see how you get on with the Baccus Napoleonics and the 10mm ACW as I'm embarking on those myself. Any chance of some pics as you progress?
It's a bit blurry and doesn't really show the detail, but they're pretty easy to paint up and look decent enough on the table too. I've only done basic basing so far, I want to wait till I get them all finished before I then do them properly so that they all match nicely.
Very nice Nick, I have never tired that small a scale.
I've added a lot to mine. I bought about 250 painted LOTR figures over the weekend. They are now making there way to get the bases repainted and flocked to match the rest of my collection. The figures' paintjobs look nice enough that I don't plan on altering them.
OK that's quite a catholic assortment there!
Just hot of the painting table.
Crann Tara Miniatures, started life as civilian gentlemen, with a wood sword, paper horse blanket you have a French brigadier 1740-ish (grey) and a senior French officer 1740-ish (blue). These figures are a joy to paint.
All I need to add to them is a drummer / ADC for the senior officer and drummer / sergeant for the brigadier.
This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by willz.
Those are delightful, William! Lovely basing, too. The flowers are a lovely touch.
Cheer's Henry Crann Tara Miniatures are a joy to paint.
Nearly finished. Base to work on. Crann Tara Miniatures.
Eureka modern Russians with some QRF mixed in, Eureka modern Australians and QRF west Germans. Grabbed some spray primer from the local store that I'll test out on some old fig's before mass primering these guys.
Also got about 40 new Laserburn guys but not sure what to do with those yet.
You prime in black? I knew I liked you for a reason.
Though I've been moving to off-whites and greys for smaller figures but black works super well.
Totally. I like that it mutes the colours a bit too and since I play mostly 20th century, everything is some shade of mud, olive or grey anyways.
Painter from 6mm all the way up! contact me if you want some work done!
I generally use grey or black car primmer acrylic spray (£2.99 a can) depending on the figure / vehicle for undercoating.
Also a "primes in black" guy: like the dulled down colours, and much easier to deal with the nooks and crannies.
Mr Harley, nice to see the Irregular figures so well done, I'm planning on using them myself so a good push there.
Spartan and a poor thing but mine own, a few at a time suits me. At present, 1/72 and 20mm Nap Austrians.
Cheers for your kind comments George, Irregular Miniatures benefit form a good pre-painting flash removal and clean up. I spray them with grey car primmer as undercoat, they are a joy to paint.
Well… from left to right… a 15mm wild west building from QRF; Balin and I think Ori; female ganger with SMGs; two O gauge train drivers for my dad, a Celtos dwarf I need as PC for PAthfinder on Saturday; three Gripping beast plastic shields, some 10mm warmaster Kislev axemen; at the back some more warhammer slayers – not that I've played warhammer in 4 years but I like slayers – and some generic ancient light infantry destined for kitbashing and the Jugula arena. Behind the railway crew who's fallen over there's some Angel Barracks 6mm being prepped, and the bag of shiney new stuff in front is 15mm Quar.
I may have focus issues.
No pictures, but the painting table has a lot of Mechs (Battleforce Scale from Iron Wind Metals), some of AB's RDF, CinC's solar empire marines, plus a few Dark Realm Skyth. I need to stop remodeling a bathroom and get painting and playing with minis!
I've just posted off the next two lots of figures to Dave Parsons and Steve Spence to be painted for me… Just do not have time to sit with a brush and get things done now – last lot took me 6 months to do about 10 15mm figures (excluding undercoat).
"Andrew Bealsley Wrote" Nothing at all.
Andrew look into my eyes, not at the face, look in my eyes. You will paint your figures it is good for your soul, make time to paint.
Sigh, I so want a painting table and game room again.
For many years all I had was an A4 box with paints and figures that I took to sea with me and could only paint when along side in port. I used to have to paint in an area 4foot x 4 foot, "its war-games law the more space you have to paint the less you paint .
I have finished over 1000 figures for my 18th century project, at the start of this year I started to re-base and upgrade or paint new figures my 28mm SYW / 18th century figures. So far I have completed 910 infantry and 136 cavalry with 200+ infantry and 100 cavalry on the painting table.
I reckon this brigadier is number 1000.
My desk is currently buried with Peninsular War British Infantry, Zombicide, and various pulp and SciFi. It is also coated in dust and detritus from work and family, since I haven't touched it since last winter.
I have entered Curt's Anologue Painting Challenge this upcoming season. I have been prepping loads from my mountain of neglect all summer long. So GW LotR, Epic, 40k, and fantasy will be competing for table time with Peninsular War French, WW2, Mechwarrior 25mm infantry, Supers, Pulp, and new 15mm SciFi.
The Steiner and Kurita infantry and GW Epic have not been touched since the last Century! I actually forgot I had them!


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Home Auto Shows
BMW M8 GTE brings BMW back to 24 Hours of Le Mans
Torque Report Staff
Before the sexy BMW 8 Series arrives, BMW will put the M8 GTE on the track next season as it competes in the FIA World Endurance Championship, in addition to the to the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans. The BMW M8 GTE debuted today at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show.
The BMW M8 GTE is powered by a 4.0L turbocharged V8 engine with more than 500 hp, depending on the classification. The cylinder block and cylinder head are taken from the production engine and are produced in the light alloy foundry at the BMW Group plant in Landshut. The V8 is mated to a sequential, six-speed racing gearbox.
2018 Ford Mustang brings back the Pony
Infiniti Prototype 9 brings us back to the past
2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Widebody brings extra grip to the track
"The BMW M8 GTE is our new GT flagship and will go head to head with the strong opposition in this sector," said BMW Motorsport Director Jens Marquardt. "For us, the presentation of the uncamouflaged car at the IAA is the next important step on the road to our first race outing, which we plan to be the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2018. The FIA WEC and the IMSA series in North America are a top competitive environment for our new challenger. With the BMW M8 GTE, we are bringing cutting-edge technology to the top international class of GT racing, whilst at the same time tying in with our tradition at Le Mans. The development of the BMW M8 GTE is on schedule, and we can hardly wait to see the car challenging for victories in 2018."
The M8 GTE went on a significant diet plan thanks to the extensive use of ultra-light CFRP components. It weighs in at at only 2,690 pounds.
Source: BMW
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The Torque Report was founded in 2007 as the go-to source for all the latest automotive news and reviews. The Torque Report is updated daily with the top trending stories, reviews and rumors about the auto industry.
BMW i8 production will end in April
BMW X2 xDrive25e plug-in hybrid arrives with 35-mile EV range
2020 BMW X3 xDrive30e plug-in hybrid starts at $49,545
BMW i3 will stick around until 2024
BMW will add Android Auto in Mid-2020
BMW adds Apple CarPlay for free
2020 BMW 2 Series Gran Coupe starts at $38,495
2022 BMW i4 will have 373-mile range and 523 HP
BMW X3 xDrive30e plug-in hybrid debuts with 292-hp


Recent years have seen the proliferation of Real World Evidence (RWE), both in availability and importance. As early pioneers in this space, Ipsos has been running the syndicated Global Therapy Monitors (the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of syndicated prescribing data) for over 25 years. Our RWE portfolio also includes other specialist syndicated services, and analysis and strategic consulting from our Global Evidence, Value & Access experts.
After all, RWE enables manufacturers to document the overall, longer-term value of their treatments – not just their safety & efficacy. RWE has applications throughout the product lifecycle and our clients use it in pre-launch, launch and post-launch to demonstrate the value and pricing of their drugs, assess patient and clinical pathways, identify sales opportunities and unmet needs, and more.
See some examples of our data in action.
The Ipsos Healthcare Global Evidence, Value & Access Group is a specialist group that integrates evidence generation and market access strategies to support the development of product value propositions. Services include survey research, data analysis, scientific publications and observational studies; all are delivered by scientific staff with extensive career publication histories.
For this study, Ipsos was shortlisted for a BHBIA BOBI Award in the 'Most innovative' category (2015).


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1914-1918 War Day by Day
1914-1918 Home
How the First World War Began
Germany's "Blank Cheque" to Austro-Hungary
Air Power in World War 1
The Battle of the Somme
Useful World War One Resources
Challenge of Battle – Adrian Gilbert
The Illustrated War Reports – Trench Warfare – Bob Carruthers
Verdun, The Left bank – Christina Holstein
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K Massie
The First World War by Hew Strachan
Austro-Hungarian Cruisers and Destroyers 1914-1918 – Ryan K Noppen, illustrated by Paul Wright
WW1 Book Reviews for Stand Easy Publishing
Memorabilia and Books for Sale
© 2021 1914-1918 War Day by Day.
On this day, November 03, 2014 at 10:30AM, One Hundred Years Ago
WW1TheGreatWar
"I must plough the seas of the world… till my ammunition is exhausted, or till a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me." Spee.
— WorldWar1 Day by Day (@WW1TheGreatWar) November 3, 2014
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Charting the daily events of World War One, this history project aims to provide a bite-sized and engaging way to follow the events of 100 years ago. Using a variety of sources, I aim to refer to the main events of the war on the centenary of their occurrence. However, it's not just about the main events, I have also taken time to research lesser known events in order to help the reader to feel engaged with the scope of the war.
© 2021 1914-1918 War Day by Day. Built using WordPress and ColibriWP Theme .


In January, Specials within Newport and Monmouthshire committed 662 hours keeping our communities safe and supporting the full time officers. Just to give you an idea, almost 50% of these hours were dedicated to response policing (attending 999 calls with officers).
On the 27th January, one of the FA Cup stages came to Newport. Newport County played Tottenham at Rodney Parade. SC Brooks, SC Walden and SC Farrington-Cox pictured in my blog this month, assisted with the large team supporting the game.
The continuing training and guidance for Special Constables is key like any other role in an organisation. Officers from a wide range of departments have played a massive part in providing this continued training so far this year. These sessions make us more tuned and prepared to deal with the wide range of scenarios we come across as police officers.
On the 22nd and 23rd January, Special Inspector Mclaughlin and myself attended a Citizens in Policing Conference held by Greater Manchester Police. We were able to meet some great people in similar positions to us who are looking to develop better pathways for Special Constables, Cadets and Police Support Volunteers. Some great ideas were shared and are already being looked at within Gwent!
Applicants that applied to become a Special in Gwent were met with the next stage of the process, a numerical and verbal reasoning test. Good luck to all of those who attended, hope to see you at some point in the future.
Thank you for taking the time to read my blog and we hope to welcome more recruits to the Special Constabulary this year to continue making an impact on your communities.


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Home Mints Swiss Mint Swiss Mint: New Commemorative Coins Swiss Army Knife, Christmas 2018
Modern World Coin
Swiss Coins
Swiss Mint
World Mint News
Swiss Mint: New Commemorative Coins Swiss Army Knife, Christmas 2018
Swissmint
By The Federal Mint Swissmint ……
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of cutlery pioneer Karl Elsener, the Swiss Federal Mint Swissmint has launched the "Swiss Army Knife" commemorative silver coin. With this new coin–as well as the 2018 Christmas coin set–the Swissmint has settled this year's numismatic program.
In the 19th century, Switzerland was one of the poorest states in Europe, and high unemployment forced many Swiss to emigrate. The creation of new jobs was therefore more than welcome. With this intention, in 1884 Karl Elsener (1860-1918) founded a cutlery workshop in Ibach.
He learned the craft during his apprenticeship in Zug and his journeyman's time in both France and southern Germany. Karl Elsener had the idea of making soldier's knives in Switzerland instead of Germany. But his operation was too small to get an army job. Therefore, he founded the 1891 Swiss Knifesmith Association with the aim of selling the soldier's knife for the Army together with other domestic cutlers. The first delivery took place that same year, never dreaming that his business would become a world-famous company would.
The soldier's knife was very robust, but also relatively heavy. That's why Karl Elsener created a lighter and above all more elegant knife with even more features for the officers. He called this new pocket-knife model the "officer's dog sports knife". Unlike the soldier's knife, the officer's knife did not become an official piece of equipment for the army. Elsener's success did not detract from this. The "Swiss Army Knife", as the officer's knife was called for export, went on its triumphal march around the globe after the conclusion of World War II. U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe bought it in large quantities and took them back home as a popular gift. The establishment of the Swiss army knife on the souvenir market since the 1970s–as well as the high value of the products in terms of quality, functionality, innovation and iconic design–helped the company Victorinox achieve worldwide fame.
Victorinox AG is today managed by the Elsener family in the fourth generation.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Karl Elsener's death, Swissmint dedicates a 20-franc silver coin to his most famous creation. Artist Nadja Baltensweiler created the design.
Simultaneously with the special coin "Swiss Army Knife", the last issue of the year appears: the Christmas coin set 2018, featuring a medal with a Christmas angel blowing a trumpet. Designer Jenny Leibundgut of Berne is responsible for the artwork.
The new limited-edition special designs have been available since September 10 at www.swissmintshop.ch.
About The Federal Mint Swissmint
The Federal Mint Swissmint is responsible for circulating coinage in Switzerland. The Mint also produces special coins and packages for the numismatic market. They also produce bimetallic coins, along with coins in silver and gold. Swissmint is also the official authority in Switzerland for authentication and provides experts for public and private clients.
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Bounce rate. These two words have probably struck more terror in your heart than most others. It's understandable why- your website is the apple of your eye, and having a high bounce rate is like having to admit that the apple might not be as red and shiny as you think it is.
However, to say that a high bounce rate is bad, and a low bounce rate is good would be simplifying the matter to a painful extent. So, if you want to know how to optimize and reduce your bounce rate, we'll first have to go into depth about what the phrase 'good bounce rate' even means.
Simply put, a bounce means a single page visit. When a user clicks on a link that connects to your page, and then exits without further interacting with the site, it is counted as a bounce. It is displayed a percentage of the total visitors your page has received. You have to note here that Google Analytics considers interaction as visiting even one additional page, besides the landing page.
There are plenty of websites that draw in a lot of traffic, and still have incredibly high bounce rates. That doesn't mean you should aspire for a bounce rate that high, especially if you're in a field that requires intensive user engagement, like ecommerce. The average bounce rate is between 26-70% for websites that are not single transaction sites. Single transaction pages, such as blogs, news, event pages, etc. usually have higher bounce rates (over 70%), as most people visiting the page are coming to read a specific piece of information, and not to interact with the site further.
The lesson you should learn from this? The bounce rate for your website depends on the purpose of the website, and the revamp strategy you put in place will also depend on the same.
Bounce rate forms the 4th most important metric when it comes to SERPs- if you're aiming for that sweet first page position on Google, you definitely have to work on optimizing your bounce rate!
How can you measure your bounce rate?
The easiest way for you to measure your bounce rate is by using Google Analytics. Log in to your Google Analytics account and open up the Audience Overview page. Here, you'll be able to see the bounce rate for your entire site.
If you want a more detailed analysis of the bounce rate for the individual pages, go to the 'Behaviour'> All Pages. Here, you'll find a detailed analysis of bounce rate for each page.
You can use Google Analytics to drill down on your bounce rate based on the date range, demographics, affinity categories, and more. All you have to do is select the Audience option, and open the report for each one of these categories.
Now that you can see what your bounce rate is, and where your problem areas are, we will be able to drill down to the root cause to your problems, and address them through these 12 steps. These will take care of your bounce rate, and ensure that they are raised to the most optimal level for your site.
When a person comes to your site- you want to captivate them. You want them to know what makes your brand unique, and give them something they can immediately catch on to. This is why you need a compelling storytelling arc for your website, and you need to develop content that matches this story. As Adam Toren of Entrepreneur opines, storytelling is what brings your brand to life.
How do you make your story translate to the audience? Keep the content simple, readable, and captivating. Purge your site of large chunks of text, or outdated information pages (imagine a person opens a link to your site to see the top fashion trends of 2008- they are definitely not going to stay).
Instead, focus on making your content flow better, in a more readable format.
Here's why a lot of websites have really high bounce rates: they are attracting a high volume of customers, but these are not the right customers for them. One of the reasons for this might be a poor keyword strategy. When building your content, you should focus on developing the right keywords- keywords that will attract high-value customers to your site.
Some keywords can be for driving any kind of traffic to your site- but you should also build in high-value commercial keywords that are popular in your industry.
Have you given a lot of thought about the user experience of your site? If not, now would be a good time to start- as it might be contributing towards a high bounce rate.
User Experience is becoming a buzzword in an increasingly distracted world- and it is focused on delivering the right content in the speediest fashion, so that the user is satisfied with every interaction on the site.
Eliminate distractions, thereby giving people a direct path to the action you want them to take on your site.
Make the navigation more intuitive, and simple, so that the users do not get lost in a maze of pages on your site.
Let's face it- on the internet, everybody's judging the book by its cover. And if the cover that your website comes in is not interesting and intuitive, you can be assured your bounce rate will be high. Investing on good design for your website will definitely have high returns- not only can it reduce your bounce rate, increase conversion, and provide clear navigation to users, it can also build your credibility among new customers, and increase their trust in your ability to deliver.
Let's think about it- when was the last time you went on a site, heard a video start playing immediately, and stayed? Most of the people share this emotion- 70% of users are annoyed by modal boxes, pop-ups and ads!
However, don't automatically dismiss modal boxes, which can be especially useful in e-commerce websites, and can be instrumental in increasing the conversions- however, you should time them just right, and use non-aggressive, but persuasive language.
Timing is of vitality here as well- Time it too early, the visitor will want to leave because they're feeling hounded. Time it too late, and the visitor has already left for another tab. However, you don't have to guess here- you can do the A/B test to find out the perfect time to make your modal box pop up.
Having a clear call to action is one of the easiest ways to ensure that a user stays on the page, and interacts with it further. By having a call to action, not only are you assuring the user of further engagement, you're also guiding them towards engagement that would be useful for you.
As an ecommerce site, if you have a free shipping policy, or free trials, or discounts going on, you should definitely have those listed prominently as well- maybe the customer is not ready to buy from you, but not necessarily unwilling to engage with your site.
One reason for a high bounce rate could be that people are not finding the information they came to the site for. Here, the simple solution is to provide a search bar, placed in a prominent place on the website, so that the user knows that they can use this option, instead of exiting immediately.
If you're offering a search option on your site, it needs to be linked to a strong site-search solution. Without this, no matter what keywords or search terms the users enter, they won't be able to find the right match.
You should pay attention to the size of the search bar as well. The ideal box is 27 characters wide (note that most search boxes are only 18 characters). However- if it is not possible for you to devote resources for such a large search tab, you can come up with workarounds- like making the search bar sticky or dynamic.
The quickest way to improve your bounce rate is by ensuring customers have multiple modes of engaging with your page. For a client facing website, a simple way of doing this is by implementing a live chat option. 73% customers felt more satisfied after using live chat- a number way higher than customer satisfaction scores for email, social media, or even telephone!
Speed is one of the most important factors determining bounce rates- 40% people leave a page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. You can see the loading time for all your pages using tools- like Google Page Insights, or Pingdom.
All you have to do is go to Google PageSpeed Insight tool, and enter your URL in the bar. Start the analysis, and you'll get a report of your site's speed and pain points.
You can also use tools like Pingdom. You just have to go Pingdom Website Speed Test, enter your URL in the search tab, and you'll get a detailed breakdown of each page's speed.
If you're running a blog, or you're referencing an external site, there is a chance you're losing audience because of leading people to these external sites, without making them open in a new tab.
Sites like WordPress allow you to design pages in a way that all external links will open in a new tab. If you can't find the option- just add target="_blank at the end of all your external links, and you're done!
A good way of keeping your bounce rate low, and user engagement high, is by adding more internal links. This way, you'll allow people to navigate around your site more, and help them organically find what they're looking for.
The users of your website might be accessing it from different browsers, and devices- whether it is a desktop, laptop, mobile, or tablet. By making your web design more responsive, you're improving the viewing experience a person has when visiting your site. Having responsive design is of high importance to certain industries like ecommerce, where the traffic from mobile has been increasing by 15% every single year!
Go to Google Analytics > Audience > Mobile > Devices, and you'll get a breakdown of analytics divided according to the device used.
You can also find the browser breakdown by selecting Technology > Browser & OS. If you're noticing a higher bounce rate for specific devices or browsers, you know there is a compatibility issue that has to be fixed.
Improving your bounce rate is not an activity that can be done in mere minutes- it can be a daunting task, but it is one that's worth investing time into. First, identify what is a good bounce rate for your industry, then narrow down the steps that would help you achieve the same! Remember: your bounce rate will fluctuate depending on the page, and the season, so don't focus only on the number. Focus on providing your customers with an engaging and fulfilling experience, and the rewards will follow!
Get a free 30-minute SEO consultation on your website. Contact us at contact@contentninja.in.


I am 31 years old mother of two. I have brown hair and brown eyes and about 5ft 4 ins tall.
50 years old. Went to school at Chapel End Juniors and Woodford County High. Took my american studies degree at Swansea Uni, graduating in 1998.
Short, dark, grew up In Birmingham. Worked as a teacher and in the Civil Service.


In particular in the context of applications targeted at users with a limited technical background, it can be beneficial to constrain the users' freedom and instead provide automated guidance and suggestions to simplify the interaction. This part of the tutorial will focus on guided navigation and exploration strategies which exploit additional information in order to fully or semi-automatically assist the user in specifying relevant visualization parameters. This includes common settings such as the viewpoint, clipping planes, transfer functions, but also extends to the choice of the visualization technique itself. Such approaches frequently rely on additional knowledge and we will discuss different strategies for obtaining the required information. Finally, we will review approaches for integrating such guidance into existing workflows with a particular focus on medical and biological applications.