sweet harmony

For new subscribers that missed the first post, it's here.

Once upon a time I was sat in a very good cocktail bar in Seoul with Mike. Sat at the next table were a group of Swedish and Californian songwriters and producers chatting over their K-pop contracts and their favourite bars around the world.

Makes sense; anyone with specific work patterns that involves lots of travel is going to know where to go.

It made me think of Eamon.

Eamon Downes and I worked together building communities of food + culture finders in a mad startup year at Qype. Eamon was funny, gentle and kind. It was important to him that everyone was looked after whether in our team or at events. We drank a thousand flat whites at Kaffeine.

The best thing about the early tech scene in London was nobody cared about credentials because not many existed yet didn't exist yet so all kinds of unusual profiles snuck in the back door (death to credentialism). It took me a while to work out he had a whole other life before startups. A lot of people knew Eamon as one half of Liquid.

I wish I could embed videos here because this room looks like it feels GOOD.

People would stop him on the street and say how much sweet harmony had meant to them. He was always lovely to them but also embarrassed; said he was a bad musician who liked to bring people together.

I heard on Tuesday he'd passed away.

That night I went to Future of Coding; a good loose crowd of builders showing off side projects from the sublime to the ridiculous. Always fun.

And Lu showed something that stopped me in my tracks.

You start with Strudel. In the browser, live, the room coded a song.

And by code I mean that even me, a weak coder by anyone's standards, can work out the rubric, add in a beat then another and by the time a minute's out you have what feels like music. Nuts!

But then you go to Nudel. Made by Pastagang, you drop into a public jam space where anyone arriving is encouraged to join, design some rules (everything's accepted) and relax into it. Nuts again!

I'm in there again, writing this, watching little cursors flicker around the screen to build something together and it sounds great.

Team Pastagang - and if you clicked through to Nudel that means you're on it - now do gigs where anyone can turn up and start playing. The next in London is Algorhythms.

It felt like real fate to learn about this on a very specific Tuesday. To learn things can be silly and light and profound all at once. What is more important than being together?

RIP Eamon.