h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This jopurnal entry was going to be just about a gig I was at this afternoon from Jamiroquoi, but I then ended up at an art gallery checking out some sound art...
First off, remember all those wakka wakka guitars and slap bass from the seventies funk music. Its still alive in 2000 with Jamiroquoi. JK and the band know how to make this stuff fresh and modern. The gig was at Covent Garden as part of BBC music live and consisted of several songs going out live on Jo Whiley's lunchtime show on radio 1. So there was a lot of standing around waiting between live songs. JK decided that he was bored of this and got the band to play a song. Unfortunately they got told to stop by someone from the council or something like that. After the main show was over the band stayed on and were willing to have done a full set, but again the man from the council got there first so we were allowed two songs. The second of which was strung out for as long as possible with solos from the band
The second part of the afternoon was spent on London's south bank. First in the book market under Waterloo Bridge where I was able to pick up three books (A Canticle for Leibowitz, Holy Blood Holy Grail and Catch 22) for just more than 6GBP
After this I went to see the Sonic Boom exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. This is an exhibition of sound art. Installations with random visuals and ambient music share space with old gramaphones playing biscuits! It was all interesting to see what people come up with for these kind of things. There were a couple of exhibits on the theme of road movies and guitars. One was an old acoustic guitar playing with a screen placed in the soundhole playing a short set of images of open road. The other was a short film called Guitar Drag, where a guitar (Fender Stratocaster) was hooked up to an amp/speaker on the back of a truck and then tied to the towbar with a rope and dragged round some part of Texas. The soundtrack was taken from the speaker and so the amplified pickups on the guitar. Interesting sounds from this one.
Outside on the sculpture terrace was an installation set up with a bunch of induction loops, and each person was given a set of headphones which could pick up the signals. The sounds were taken from nature, babbling brooks, jungle noises, bird calls. Strange walking round listening to this looking out over the concrete sea that is the south bank.
I'd recomend this exhibition to anyone who's interested in sounds, how you listen to things and what could be classed as music.