A Straight Line

Download on Soundcloud.

Lead Vocals and Countdown: Lisa Payne
Harmony Vocals: Kate St.Claire
Bellzouki: Ed Lynch-Bell 
Electric Guitar, Programming and Everything Else: Kate St.Claire

"In Non-Euclidean geometry
The shortest path between A and B
Is not necessarily
A straight line"

Now that's a rhyme I'm quite proud of. I had been reading about multi-dimensional geometry on account of, well, being in a band called Shimura Curves, I thought I better have some general understanding of what the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture (now called the Modularity Theorem) actually was. I was aware it was something linking number theory, in the form of Fermat's Last Theorem, to the strange and wondrous multi-dimensional mathematical shapes that also included Calabi-Yau Spaces (once linked to the idea that all the extra dimensions that needed to be added to String Theory to make Grand Unification work mathematically might be bundled up in very small spaces indeed - I haven't kept up with the theory over the past ten years, so this is probably all terribly out of date)...

The band arrived for rehearsal at Anna's house one day, to find that someone had erected a representation of the 3-dimensional shadow of a 4-Dimensional Hypercube (at which I gasped, "Ah, yes! The Tesseract!") using toothpicks and blueberries, on the living room table, so multi-dimensionality was very much in my mind. It was my favourite joke, back when I used to drink, that when I started lurching about and staggering, I would insist "I'm not drunk. I'm just being affected by gravitational masses beyond the visible dimensions, so in the fourth dimension, I'm walking a perfectly straight line!"

The central metaphor was the idea that the courses of airplanes around the globe were generally plotted around Great Circles, which are the shortest possible path between any two points on a curved surface such as a globe, but which look dramatically curved when viewed on a standard 2-Dimensional map affected by the usual distortions of map projections. A similar kind of phenomenon affects cosmological horizons, where an event happening very far away cannot be viewed in certain quadrants because light, travelling through straight lines in four-dimensional spacetime, cannot reach it in time.

Of course this was all a heavy-handed way of expressing that progress in one's own life isn't necessarily linear, there are all kinds of set-back and detours, but only with hindsight from a different perspective, can the "great circle" of the curved and circuitous path be ascertained. Or something.

The introduction, especially the slow, stately guitar rhythm and the little piano riff, is of course shamelessly nicked from Time by La Düsseldorf. (It's amazing to me, how no one ever called us on our shameless lifts, as if people didn't actually listen to the record before going "ah, sounds like The P*p*ttes.") The countdown was originally purely accidentally. The song was so long and so linear (and deliberately "Lang-Gerade", as Klaus Dinger used to call his motorik beat) that Lisa used to have to count the bars to know when the next verse was due to begin. When someone pointed out that Spiritualized had already used this trick in 200 Bars, we turned it around, counting down, calm and steady, like the countdown to a rocket launch. This proved so effective it became a regular feature of the song. (Around 2.30 the bassline shifts to a quite deliberate homage to Mr. William B. Carruthers' famous bassline - like I said, shameless! Absolutely shameless!)

I'm Not Afraid

Download on Soundcloud.

Lead Vocals: Kate St.Claire
Harmony Vocals: Lisa Payne
Analogue Synth: Frances May Morgan
Bellzouki: Ed Lynch-Bell
Electric Guitar, Programming and Everything Else: Kate St.Claire

A random email out of the blue yanked me back across a decade. Someone From The Internet was looking to complete their collection of Shimura Curves tracks. I thought I had chucked everything I ever had up on Soundcloud to download, but when I went to check, the album was only half there. Side 1, the Sugary Girlpop side was still there. Side 2, the Mathspop side, was missing. Why? Oh, a boring and complicated story involving a broken computer and a lost job. Frankly, in the 5 years since I posted these tracks (not to mention the 10 year since the band ceased to exist) no one ever came looking for it.

There's already a blog on here about how I wrote I'm Not Afraid, which was based on a John D. Barrow book about infinity. I thought there was another post somewhere, quoting a reviewer* who fantasised a whole Shimura Curves video about four sexy girl-scientists, piloting a sleek spacecraft through a black hole, looking very noble and mathematical in their in lab coats as they stared off into the cosmos, while conducting scientific experiments the whole time. Add some oscilloscopes, and lot of reel to reel tape recorder technology, and that would be the aesthetic with which the whole band was conceived. I think Dopplereffekt got there first, but I still think sometimes, about how wonderful that video might have been. Sigh.

Pop songs about maths, sung by attractive women, I have no idea why this wasn't a bigger success! (Where is my luxury pad in Berlin, my expensive drug habit, and my beautiful model-wife? Where?)

The song was an explicit statement: "I'm not afraid of maths" and not afraid of technology or computers or electronic music, or all the things I loved, even though the gendered landgrab of trying to claim these things for Masculinity was in full force at the time I wrote the song. I still work in STEM, and work with maths (the boring kind, data analysis). In my dayjob, I am now a sort of crime-fighting mathematician (yes it is every bit as exciting as it looks on NUMB3RS, I spend most of my day walking up to whiteboards and writing STATISTICAL ANALYSIS!!! and underlining it three times until the perps gibber and wail and confess their nefarious crimes before I even start getting out the equations.)

But other things happened to me in the meantime, in terms of letting go of the gender identity of ~being a girl~ and seeing where I ended up. But that's a weird one. To want to halt the gendered landgrab of STEM by saying "all of these things are for women"; but at the same time acknowledging "actually, when it comes down to it, I don't think I am a woman." I look at the clothes I was wearing in that photo shoot in the linked blog from 2006 (and in the photo shoot for the cover of our single, Stronger) and it seems like it was obvious to everyone else before it was obvious to me. But then again, lots of complex social things that seemed obvious to other people were confusing, mysterious and arcane to me; while percentages and probabilities, things that seemed impossible to them, seemed simple to me. All the things I wasn't afraid of: infinities, relativity, singularities. But there were so many things I was afraid of, and didn't understand at all. I stopped writing about those things - sex, relationships, romance - and started writing about things I did understand. Like maths.

*Edit: Haha, it was Fluxbog! Video treatment: The lovely girls of the Shimura Curves are pop scientists. You see them checking data, making measurements, working at computers, and conducting experiments in their laboratory. The lab’s decor is somewhere between Apple’s current design aesthetic and 60s sci-fi. The band should appear serious and diligent, but also quite beautiful and stylish. When they make declarations like “I’m not afraid of infinities” on the choruses, they make eye contact with the camera, looking both noble and matter-of-fact. There should be a certain mid-20th century propaganda art aesthetic to the entire video, though there should not be any direct appropriation of famous images. The video should end with the girls standing together at night, staring off into the night sky and pondering the cosmos.