The (British) Summertime

It's been a busy time since my last post and this is mostly because all of my time has been spent preparing for my wedding which is next Saturday. Because I know I won't be posting on here for a few weeks at least because of the wedding and then the honeymoon, I thought I would share a few things with everyone.

Animals

This is a bit of a silly thing to post up but this week I have had a lot of dealings with cats. I do like cats.

This cat was wandering the streets of West Didsbury and really liked Danielle.

This cat was in Didsbury Village and apparently was homeless. I bought it some delicious Aldi cat food.

 

This was sent to me by my friend Joseph Chesshye. He loves cats.

Enough cats for now.

Music

Here is some music for the British Summertime. Listen on Spotify HERE.

Bjork

She's back and with an amazing new song, video for said song, and remixes. Very annoyingly I wasn't able to see her when she played in Manchester and I've still never seen her. I hope she plays again soon when I'm not poor.

This video is from her performing in Cambridge in 1998 and this version of Joga is just absolutely amazing.

Work

And now to my work. I've had a few jobs since the last post and will put stuff up as soon as possible. Also, there could be some very exciting work coming my way soon and as ever will let you know more when I'm allowed to say something!

Wedding

As mentioned at the top of this post I am getting married a week today. I can't wait. See you all again when I'm a husband! 

May and Music

I've just spotted that my last post was on 1st April and I think that demonstrates just how busy I've been over the past two months! I've worked on a few projects in that time, mostly for the wonderful people at Space/Matte Black but have also been working on a short for Finite Productions. It's called 'Beyond the River' and is a great little short shot in Australia. It's quite dark and so making the sound match the narrative has been a great challenge. Adding to this challenge has been the fact that it was shot metres away from the runway at Sydney airport and so some of the dialogue editing has been challenging!

I'll put up some of this work soon and hopefully very soon I will actually put my new showreel up which I think I threatened a while ago! I've worked on some great things over the past year and so want to show it all off!

To finish, here's some new music. It's a Juno Jam and as a result is really quite self-indulgent but I do love my Juno 60.

Actually, do people really subscribe to this blog? My site statistics tell me people do subscribe so if anyone is reading, please do say hello!

An update for Spring

Hello? Hello. I'm never quite sure how to greet the many people that read this great blog but I think once in a while a bit of politeness never goes amiss. And so on to the update...

It's been a busy couple of days but good ones and so I thought I would share them. On Monday I travelled to Nottingham to do a guest lecture to BA Music Tech students at Confetti/De Montfort Uni on sound to picture. I've delivered the lecture regularly for the past few years and it's great fun being able to talk about sound for a few hours to (hopefully) some interested people. This time I had the amazing luxury of delivering the lecture in Screen 3 at the Broadway cinema which was quite funny as it wasn't too full! However it was great having a very good quality digital projector and some great speakers in which to show some examples (2001, Die Hard etc). Being in Nottingham also gave me the chance to catch up with some old friends and so a few hours were spent tasting some of the delights of the Broadway bar. Sadly I then had to leave to go back to Manchester. For all of its problems (crime, pigeons, weird accents etc) Nottingham is a good place and I do have some very good friends there.

Now to yesterday where I attended an event at (NW?) Vision and Media about music synch which was delivered by Rachel Wood from Woodwork Music. It was an incredibly intensive day and definitely odd to be on the other side of some education but every single topic that was covered was incredibly interesting and insightful. There are going to be some changes on this site as a direct result of the day but there will be more news on that soon.....

And to finish off yesterday I was working on a couple of mixes for the very good people at Space Digital which took me until the early hours this morning. I'm sure I'll put up some of that work very soon.

And to make this post worthwhile; some music. Spring is sort of here and so I've put together some music. Thanks Spotify. You can hear it HERE.

Four Tet - Harmony One
The Avalanches - Two Hearts in 3/4 Time
Bibio - haikuesque (when she laughs)
Efterklang - Collecting Shields
Grizzly Bear - Easier
Apparat - It's Gonna Be A Long Walk
Boom Bip - Last Walk Around Mirror Lake (Boards of Canada Remix)
Bjork - Sun in my Mouth
Colleen - The Happy Sea
Helios - Halving the Compass
Claude Debussy - Images: Reflets dans l'eau

There's clearly a pattern forming with the same artists regularly being included in these playlists but hopefully you'll enjoy the music. And to finish off, here is just a glimpse of some of the scenery from the train between Manchester and Sheffield.

J Dilla

Ever since I heard 'Intergalactic' by the Beastie Boys in early 1998 when I was fourteen (and also 'Gimme Some More' by Busta Rhymes later the same year), I have been a massive fan of hip hop. As with any genre of music, hip hop brings certain stereotypes in terms of your standard listener and so as a white, middle class teenager living in rural Kent I probably didn't fit the mould too much. I learnt as much as I could living there and found new artists through friends, friend's older brothers and people I worked with at the Virgin Megastore I used to work at but as the internet wasn't as fully formed as it is now it was tough. As such most of the hip hop I liked was pretty mainstream.

It was going to uni in Brighton and meeting someone on my course that was into hip hop that I was introduced to more non-commercial hip hop such as the artists on Anticon, Madlib, Antipop Consortium, El-P, and MF Doom. Out of that list it's probably Madlib that I regard the best and his album 'Champion Sound' as 'Jaylib' that I've listened to the most. 'Jaylib' is Madlib and a producer called J Dilla (Jay Dee) and sadly it's only been in the past few years that I've come to understand the greatness and ability of the latter. Sadly he died in 2006 but the legacy he has left is quite exceptional. He worked with a wealth of mainstream artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Busta Rhymes and Erykah Badu but also produced a huge amount of music under his own name and his influence can be heard in so much contemporary hip-hop, yet so few people have heard of him.

This self-indulgent ramble about my interest in hip-hop is merely my introduction to a documentary made about J Dilla that provides an amazing insight into an incredibly talented musician and producer.

Very early demos

I've wanted to share some very early versions of tracks for a while, and having spent a few hours recently working on some music it seemed appropriate to put it here. During the weekend I dusted off my old Boss RC20XL as it had gone unused since I had last moved. I definitely take a different approach to making music using it, and it's also a much quicker affair as I tend to be much more spontaneous and improvise much better.

These are the results:

This first one is intentionally whimsical and is a rough attempt at a 'Juno' style guitar track. The vocals are very much improvised at present!

 
The second one was produced incredibly quickly and each part was the first take and as such it does feel rough and spontabeous.

The plan now is to work both either into one composition or produce two simple acoustic tracks. I will then post the result(s) for everyone to hear.