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That was a strange evening. I met Will and Dave Green - he of NTK et al - in the pub that borders Liverpool Street. Wetherspoon’s. Ugh. Still, we stopped for only one drink and some strange MSG-infused snacks in a bag, and nattered to Spen as he sat there putting off the inevitable trip home to a nappy filler.

By the time we left, it was sptting with rain. I don’t know how long it had been doing that, in spite of the fact we’d been sitting outside in the cold, so we pulled our coats around us as Dave marched us down Brick Lane, beyond the curries and even the bagels until it seemed we were almost far enough east to be walking through Romford or Grays. Then by a fenced off basketball court, we turned left, through a gap in a corrigated iron fence and through a broken yard to a door that swung lazily on its hinges.

The words State 51 had been stencilled on the gate.

We were here for the dorkbot, a meeting of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’. And when they say ’strange’, they really do mean strange.

We found ourselves in an empty shell of a room. Front and back there were tressle tables. The one at the back was home to an improvised bar, the one at the front temporary home to an Italian man, talking at close quarters into a microphone pressed hard to his lips.

The rest of the room was littered with people, variously scattered on old wooden reels that once were the core of a coil of industrial cable, or on long wooden benches, or propped against the walls.

We’d arrived late, so the Italian man was already half way through his lecturette, explaining how he had taken photos of city skylines, reduced them to just two colours, so that all of the ground and buildings were black, and all of the sky was white, and then used the resulting jagged line where the two met as the basis of a waveform, which he used to make music.

Music in the loosest sense, of course. Imagine static on a poorly tuned TV.

He called the results ‘horizons made of sound’.

Next up, a woman who transmitted a looping bleepy sound at the far end of the FM band. The limp bodies scattered around the room tuned in the various radios that had been sprinkled between them into the frequency she was using so that they could all pick up the beeps, and feed them back into the mixing desk. From there they went out again, and then back into the desk. And out and in and out and in, all the time getting louder and louder and LOUDER until the room was filled with an almost deafening cacophony of hiss and crackle and feedback.

One man, sitting in the middle of the group, held his radio up above his head and shook it, as though he were dancing to the beat of a tune I somehow couldn’t hear.

The two highlights, though, had to be Hack the Bid, a long-overdue campaign to show that not everyone in London wants the Olympics here, and Will, totally unplanned, playing some of his remix of the next Chemical Brothers album from his MP3 player.

He looked very cool. There was very little lighting there, other than a bare strip light behind the tressle table at the front of the room, silhouetting whoever was speaking. All you could see of him was an anonymous outline, dotted in the middle by the amber ember on the end of his cigarette. He looked like a ‘protected identity’ witness on the news.

A fab night, all in all. Very, very weird, but then that was half the appeal.

Elsewhere, irony on CNN:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Journal, London, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.