Start Up

Far be it from me to take the corporate shilling and promote a multinational corporation- but almost all of use Windows don’t we? If not Windows then Apple? And I’m not being paid anyway. Months ago someone directed me to these on Twitter, possibly Davy H of the much missed and still sadly inactive Ghost Of Electricity blog. To mark the occasion of the 20th birthday of Windows 95 ideoforms put these onto Soundcloud, the Windows 95 start up sound slowed down by 4000%, followed by the same slowed down effects for Windows 98, 2000, NT, Vista and XP.

All of them become rather wonderful, ambient, Eno-esque moods rather than the brief and sometimes irritating sound of your operating system bursting into life. Eno actually contributed to the creation of the 95 jingle and Robert Fripp did the Vista one. You could probably slow many things down and get them to sound like Eno and turn them into interesting ambient pieces. But like the person in the art gallery who points and says ‘my five year old could have done that’, it’s the doing it that’s important.