I edited this brutally after overrunning last year (‘Let Words Die’), thinking that losing my voice might mean taking it slowly. I ended up underrunning by a minute. Which meant throwing away a fairly nice one-liner. Anyway, stuff in italics, like this, is stuff I want to include in the transcript even if I didn’t actually say it out loud. Self-indulgence? It’s my blog.
Sometimes the appropriate tone to set with the last words of a conference is one of comfort and conciliation. This year, with everybody in this industry seemingly in various degrees of difficulty, would be the correct time to uplift, inspire, and bring together. Instead, here’s a collection of abusive in-jokes.
The hottest new thing in audio
Hello. Welcome to the Audio Damnation Conference.
So many new faces! You may be wondering who I am. So let me remind you that I built this conference, the flying badgers with razor-sharp claws that roam its corridors, the burning hellscape that it stands in, indeed, the whole of Hell itself. But, in my humbler capacity as conference Chair, it’s my pleasure to say that none of this would have been possible without … me.
Sure, we inhabit a cruel and jumbled Renaissance-inspired satire of the lives we led on Earth, but that doesn’t stop us getting together every year to remove the red hot needles from our eyes, put our Windows 8 development machines on standby, and talk about our craft.
Big shout out to the newbies from Ultraleap. You may be wondering what you’re doing in Hell, still breathing, still asking how a simple acquisition can produce a result like this. Treat me as your guide to what I like to call our Music Tribe. Talk about Ultraleaping out of the fucking frying pan.
While I’m thanking myself, well done — to me again — for securing our sponsors, Suno. If your punishment involves your own output being plugged forever back into your input, their business will be very familiar to you. As, indeed, will yours.
Onto our second sponsor. They don’t have much to do with audio, but they gatecrash any music played online with such inane ambition that, even in our infernal realm, we can but applaud. Give it up for Grammarly. Good work, guys! Today, any dickhead can be a writer. And I, for one, should know.
On to a feature announcement: we’ve solved the tabs versus spaces argument by disabling both keys on your computers, along with the return button. The bug this fixes is having to adjudicate the same bloody argument every time you guys commit whitespace. So you won’t be needing your precious monospaced fonts, and that change has now been made to the code editor too.
Have fun with Times New Roman.
Before I introduce the line-up, I’ve got this that I have to read from the conference facility. ‘You’ll notice that the pavement outside is being dug up. The tear in spacetime that separates our Circle from the Circle of Private Equity is being repaired. You are commanded to keep away.’
This hardly needs saying, but we’re not concerned about your personal safety. It’s just that you people screwed the finance guys so hard last time you met that they’re all coming after me.
On to tonight’s schedule. If you stay in this room after the welcome, there’s a trio of talks about the audio business.
‘Draining the blood of your coders without conceding power or nurturing trust’: that’s by Roland Lamb of ROLI. Then we’ve got ‘All In This Together: Acquiring your suppliers by becoming extremely indebted to them’, which is by … Roland Lamb of ROLI. Finally ‘Walk towards the camera in slow-mo, flicking a single hair nonchalantly off your jacket collar while, behind you, the mushroom cloud engulfs the whole screen’, delivered by … Yes, yes, three talks in a row by Roland Lamb, each more nauseatingly self-regarding than the last. I should explain: this world was built for your punishment, Sonny Jim. And in this Hell, he gets away with it.
Next door in Room 3, we have ‘Two megabytes of unreadable preprocessor macros written by a guy who didn’t trust the standard libraries’. That’s not a talk title, apparently: you’re just responsible for it now.
Then we’ve got ‘A sprawling toolchain that one of your products depends on, only ever run on the Engineering Director’s old laptop, and he’s just rage quit without giving us the password’. That’s not a talk title, apparently: you’re just responsible for it now.
Lastly, we have ‘An underperforming audio interface brand’. That’s not a talk either.
The third track is a succession of short talks about hard maths, delivered by smart, bright-eyed people half your age who are having twice as much fun as you ever did, and will find you curiously amusing as they stride smartly into well-paid jobs in another industry.
But before all that, I hope you’re literally glued to your seats for our keynote speaker: a senior academic who once got airplay on Radio 3. It’s entitled ‘Two hours about my approach to music composition, without stopping to play a note, mention the word ‘music’, or acknowledge anyone except myself’.
I don’t know what sort of code you committed while you were alive, friends, and I don’t want to. But this bloody well serves you right.
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