In Issue 19 we started the tour of the new Deluxé playroom, “Sanctum Sanctorum” but hit the word limit before we managed to move on from the grand entrance, aka “The Hall Of The Six True Kings”. I also promised to tell the tale of the Dark Knight, so let’s now enter the Main Chamber and start with the Pièce de résistance of our humble studio. Well, of those pièces anyway. (more…)
Uncannily many writings of ancient people worldwide tell the same story, that of decline from an original age of imagination and hope. Mysterious artifacts and sites around the world have been created with help of knowledge and culture more advanced than our current one. This ‘Golden Age’ is perhaps best captured in the legendary monument known as “’TWA Flight Center’, designed by Arch-Architect Eero Saarinen. While it’s impossible to fully understand the depth of Saarinen’s genius, leading popular experts agree on what is most likely the original source and inspiration for his seemingly unlimited creative power: his childhood home. (more…)
Johann Christian Andreas Doppler (1803-1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist best known for research into the effects of motion on acoustic pitch, known as the ‘Doppler effect’. Doppler knew of the existence of sound waves, and he also knew that the pitch of a sound is dependent on the length of those waves. If a source is moving toward the listener, he supposed, the waves in front of the source would be squeezed together, creating a higher frequency. A sound source moving away from the listener would create a lower frequency. It is important to realize that the frequency of the sounds that the source emits does not actually change: it is the wavelength which is affected and as a consequence, the perceived frequency is also affected. (more…)
For the past few months I’ve been working mainly on the cover art and graphics for our videos and live visuals, and as there really haven’t been any deeper Pepe audio explorations, I decided to take some time to answer a few questions we’ve received about the album Spare Time Machine. (more…)
James Spectrum is away due to promotional duties for Pepe Deluxe’s new album ‘Spare Time Machine’. Here are some pics of James and the band going about their Pepe Deluxe business.
Walt Disney was man who dreamed BIG. By early ‘60s he had created not just an empire but also a land bearing his own name. But he was not ready to rest on his laurels; instead he wanted a whole new world. The problems with the old one and especially its cities were (and still are) the same: pollution, feverish tempo of life, crime and general chaos. He wanted something else for his grandchildren, something that he’d experienced only in his own land. This simple thought led to an idea of almost biblical proportions: a futuristic, clean, organized, self enclosed community where everyone and everything worked smoothly. (more…)
Last month I wrote about thermal expansion and Imperator, the first compressor to use miniature light bulbs to control the level of audio. Before I’m gonna tell you about the second generation Imperator, let’s meet another member of the electrical component family, namely LDR. That’s short for Light Dependent Resistor, also known as photoresistor, furthermore known as photocell. An LDR is a variable resistor, its value decreasing with exposure to light. The change in resistance is actually very major, dropping to about 1/100000 of the maximum resistance when very bright light is used. LDRs are used in street lamps to switch them on in the evening and off in the morning as well as in other applications such as flame, smoke and movement detectors, card readers and photographic light meters.
One of the most arduous, frustrating and challenging tasks known to man is opening a stuck jar lid. Unless you’re the strongman of the local circus, you do benefit greatly from the fact that steel heats much faster than glass and steel’s thermal expansion coefficient is about 40% greater than that of glass. (more…)
When preparing a historical phrase, it’s usually a good idea to come up with stuff that’s intelligible to at least some extent. People might remember Philipp Reis as the silver medallist of telephone inventors had he stated something along the lines “A small sentence for man … etc.” or “I just called to say I love you”. But instead poor Phillip’s historic first telephone words were “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat”, roughly translating as “The horse eats no cucumber salad”. On the other hand, while he might not be that famous, his immortal phrase does make him a hero of a very chosen few, naturally including the team Deluxé. (more…)
A fingerprint is an impression on a surface, usually made by ink, of the curves formed by the friction ridges on the skin of a fingertip. Friction skin ridges are not unique to humans: orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas have them on their fingers too, and spider monkeys on the tips of their versatile tails used for climbing. It probably comes as little surprise that the general purpose of friction skin ridges is believed to be providing traction for grasping objects. (more…)
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