This is what happens when adults turn into children and then into party animals. Rumpus - the best Party in London. Check out http://rumpusparty.co.uk

And here is a link to the whole Facebook gallery: So get tagging! :))

...that's where I put them:

So London had finally some snow last night. Unfortunately this is pretty much all that remained of it. :(

If a tree would make music what would it sound like? A bizarre question you would think. But the artist Bartholomaeus Traubeck seems to have found an answer. And it is a truly mesmerising one. He slized up a tree and put it on a vinyl player just like a vinyl.

Listen to this, it gave me goosebumps:

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

But the process is a little more complex than that as it is stated on his website:

"A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."

The concept is one of the most striking I have seen and heard in a long time. When you think about it - the "melody" of each ring is totally different from tree to tree - like a finger print is different from human to human. The size and shape of the rings depend on the nutriants in the soil, the purity of the air, the ammount of rain, heat and frost, parasites or fire. Some years a tree grows faster and gets thicker rings - sometimes he nearly starves or dehydrates and the results are finner lines. All of these factors destine the melody we hear.

Music made by a tree - music made my nature. Magic.

Here is the website of the artist: http://traubeck.com/years/

I left Berlin about 10 years ago and since then the city has changed A LOT. Unfortunately not always to the better. My beloved hometown has undergone a massive clean up and upmarket-conversion. Hence many old and interesting buildings then often still showing the scars and bullet holes from the second world war have now been sanitised or knocked down.

For me that is in many cases a big loss - as those imperfections made it so different from all those polished cities in the rest of Germany and so inspiring for artists and art lovers from around the world.

But not all is lost and of course there are still many fascinating things to discover. Although I am a bit scared that in another 10 years time this will be much, much harder to do.