Celebrations of Light

in these last weeks, and more so days I've been touched by the exquisite energy of this time of year. The darkness (here in the UK) and then the sense of the light as if it would never come again, and the fine fine energy an joy of that as it started on it's way again.

It's so wonderful to me how at this time of year, so many many cultures have a celebration, of one kind or another, of the light.

How you have been touched, I wonder, by the magic that is around as we pass through this season?

Wishing you wonderful things for this holiday time and for 2008
















this is a photo of a present that my sister sent my from Australia, it's looking out of my music studio window down the valley, if you'd see the original and a couple of others , take a look at my Winter photo album

Winter Wind - sound sketch

I have a sense of both of a wonderful silvery stillness, that seems to be connected with the solstice in a few days, and also the energy of all the activity connected with the preparation for 'holiday' and 'meetings' (and 'not meetings') of family iwth all the pain and hope for that.

This morning this came which seems very connected for me with that. I've looped some sounds in 'Live', treated them a bit and added some voice. An hour seems so short to do this and I'm getting a clearer sense of what I'd like to do and develop with these recordings and my playing.




or to download, right click and 'save as' (3.2mb)

Guitar Swirls - sound sketch

There's a kind of swirling energy , with softness that continues here in the valley. it's colder now and such a sweet resting stillness.

This morning I played with layers of looping with the LoopStation. simply that, just another sketch. click below to play




or to download, right click and 'save as' (3.2mb)

Dartmouth loopstation live

At the weekend I played at Dartmouth Festival of Healing Arts. Amazing to feel and see the power that sound has. at one point, one of the healers giving a treatment started playing a crystal bowl; it was exactly the right thing, the right note, the right energy; what we created together opened the space magically and beautifully.

This morning I tried out some ideas with one of the tracks that I'd recorded live at the Festival using on the loop station. click below to play



or to download, right click and 'save as' (4.6mb)

is that email a hoax

Often times people really care and want to keep their friends safe however it's not always initially clear if something is a hoax or not. As I seem to keep getting asked this kind of thing here are some of the things that I've found can be useful to check if an email is a Hoax or not:

The quick way I have as a 'heads up' when I think something might be a Hoax is to cut a section of the email ( 7 or 8 words, so it's long enough) and paste them into a web search engine ( I like Every Click )

How do you recognise if it's a Hoax? Well I've started to get a 'sense' for it. This is partly through trusting my intuition also reading about it. There is some really good information about how to recognise Hoaxes at http://www.hoax-slayer.com/#latest-email-hoaxes

I find this http://www.hoax-slayer.com/ website generally is also a good way to check if something is a Hoax

It's also useful to know and use some basic email saftey measures.

basic email saftey

There are several pretty important things to do to keep safe when using email

One thing I've heard and seen over and over that the best thing to do to keep safe is to not open anything if you don't know who its from, if it's a blank email, the subject doesn't make sense, or has an attachement that isn't mentioned by the person who sent it; if in doubt delete and or ask the person who sent it!

Another thing is to use, and keep up-to-date, a good set of basic protection software; a good firewall, antivirus and anit spyware, are all pretty essential these day's; I also now use a good spam filter to filter out spam before it lands in my computer.

And, finally, if sending a group email, it's now pretty much a good practice to use Bcc or a group mail sending program or company - it helps keep the spam down.

search engine that raises money for charity

Everyclick is a search engine that lets you raise money for charity.
this was recommended to me by a friend who is a parent at the local Steiner School in Exeter.

I really love to have money from my web searches going to help a good cause, rather than profits for a big, huge even, business. You can chose your charity or join me in money going to the Steiner School.

Every Click is based on the Ask search engine, I sometimes find it useful to search in Google search

email melt down/gridlock

For several years some people have been talking about email melt down. I've experienced my second mini meltdown this year.

major delays on emails

sending email via smtp often not working

receiving email via pop3 often not working

webmail often inaccessible

Back in the summer I started to have pretty big problems with my emails getting delayed, sometimes for days, also sometimes not being able to send. Eventually after quite some research on the web and talking with a couple of different ISP's I discovered that there was a spate of spambot computers taking over the web servers of ISPS's, and sending out lots I mean lots of Spam and flooding them, causing them to gridlock.

It was a fairly new technology for several ISP's to deal with. and took a while for some of them to fix. My ISP at that time, Ontel, had their web servers major compromised for about 6 weeks)

There is now another spate of this happening; I'd started to notice problems earlier on in November. and last week the same major delays for my email started happening with Lycos servers.

I also discovered that anyone sending from Lycos smtp or with an email or domain that is listed with Lycos will not be able to send email to hotmail or yahoo addresses and some others.

I've now set up a new account . . . (which I'm not going to put on this bog !!)

My websites www.movingsound.com and www.christofferdegraal.com are hosted with Lycos and all the emails I have given to people are with that domain, so I really REALLY hope that this gets fixed soon. ( I spoke with their customer help line. they've been working on fixing it for several weeks now.)

I thought initially that this was just for the ISP's concerned. However, in another conversation, ( how OD I get into these conversations !?!) It was explained to me that when I send an email it goes down kind of like a motorway, looking for junctions that are free enough to take... to go to the next 'sector' as the email jumps from the wiring from one ISP to another, going around the world.

Unfortunately even if the ISP I am using is not overrun by Spam, my email can end up going thru a grid locked ISP because the sign at the junction say's all is ok and then, a very short way down the path . . . gridlock and delay.

SO . . . at the moment this problem that some of the individual ISP's have can effect us all. It's a kind of leapfrog of spammers causing increasingly complex problems that then take some time to fix; weeks at a time it seems.

hope this of use for some people somewhere. -- now I need to prepare to send another update to let people know my new address.

Winter Dance - sound sketch

It's been a while since I've been into the studio. It took a while to get the technical things in place. Then I brushed against the wonderful drum/plucked bass drone that Giles Petit has made. (borrowed form a friend) recorded this then added some voice and viola, and quick bit of mastering.




or to download, right click and 'save as' (4.6mb)