the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Josh Doyle used to be the singer in the Dum Dums, a very fine pop/punk band who were basically the template for Busted, only their songs were better and the album was better produced. Anyway, they split a couple of years ago, and Josh is now a solo artist, and has a new single, free for download from here – it’s rather good, go and have a listen. If you like it, you can go to Josh’s site and buy the rest of his stuff!
Simple as that.
Soundtrack – Mike Watt, ‘Contemplating The Engine Room’.
As if we needed them!
Taking a leaf out of George Bush’s book, today the Conservative party leader Michael Howard announced that he’d back a change in the law on abortion.
Now, Michael Howard having an opinion on abortion is no bad thing – I’m rather glad that he’s concerned. What is a HUGE problem is him turning it into an election issue. This is clearly in response to observing how single-issue voting helped the right in the US – by turning the election into a conflict about abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research, the republicans mobilised millions of conservative religious people in the US, who considered those issues more important than protecting the poor and the enviroment…
The lunacy of Howard’s pronouncement here is that Abortion has always been a free vote in UK parliment!!! – it’s never been a partisan issue. The various lobby groups involved are cross party, and no party has ever applied the whip to try and get a particular result.
So his motivation is clearly to divide opinion and paint Labour as child-hating murderers… What a loser, what a party full of losers.
I really really wish we had a stronger opposition in UK politics. Labour have got very complacent and started doing some really stupid things (the war being the most obvious example) – a strong opposition is good for the democratic process. But Michael Howard is such a waste of time. I’d hate to see the Tories get back in in the UK, but I’d like to see them push Labour harder than they are.
this is so lame – the US election was a farce because ‘people of faith’ were blackmailed into supporting a party that embodied virtually no ‘christian values’ but talked the talk of ‘personal morality’ – they give tax breaks to the super rich and make life ever harder for the poor, pollute the enviroment, crap on the rest of the planet, wage unjust wars and are fronted by a moron, but they were elected by scaring right-wing so-called-christians into voting against abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research.
Those are all really important issues, but not deciding calls in an election, especially not a UK one.
Email your local MP and tell them just how crap this is.
Soundtrack – Kristin Korb/Todd Johnson, ‘Get Happy’; Tom Waits, ‘Foreign Affairs’.
I’ve just been listening to ‘Absolution’ by Muse – the songs are great, the playing’s great, the sounds are great… but the mastering is SOOOO harsh!! The whole album is flatlining at close to 0dB all the way through – so little light and shade, distorted vocals, squished drums… MAKE IT STOP!!
Why do bands do this? At least one track on the new album by The Killers is like this too – Glorious Indie Rock ‘n’ Roll is so over compressed I get major ear-fatigue after about two minutes. It’s a shame, cos it’s a great song.
This kind of mastering job used to be reserved for single edits of songs – it makes tracks sound great on small cheap radios (think ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Bartender And The Thief’ by Stereophonics). But to mix a whole album like that is just painful – stop doing it!!
Mastering is such a sensitive part of the recording process – it’s what happens after the tracks are recorded and mixed – you send a Cd of the mixes to a dedicated mastering person who then compresses and EQs the tracks to make sure that the level is consistent between the tracks, and that there are no rogue peaks in the audio that means the rest of the track has to be really quiet to accomodate them. In more extreme circumstances, the whole track can be really obviously compressed to bring the average level right up. That’s what’s happened here, and it really hurts your ears listening to it on good speakers.
the mastering on Grace And Gratitude was done by Denis Blackham – a hugely experienced and skilled mastering engineer who got the job on my stuff because he’d mastered Theo Travis’ albums, and also ‘Spirit Of Eden’ by Talk Talk – one of my favourite albums, and one of my favourite sounding albums.
He did a great job of taking my pre-mastered mixes and doing the compression and EQ magic required to bring the overall level up a bit without losing the dynamics on the tracks. There’s some serious audio-voodoo involved in mastering, and Denis has clearly got the mojo. I’d recommend him highly if you’re wanting to get a record mastered.
Soundtrack – Muse, ‘Absolution’; Tommy Simms, ‘Peace And Love’.
OK, so it could just be another phoney exercise in pretending to talk to the people concerned before ploughing ahead with whatever crap policy they came up with in the first place, but the government are at least pretending to want to hear from people in the music industry about how to improve things for live musicians in Britain.
Here’s the page about it on the culture secretary’s page – all looks good. The email address to contact them is LiveMusicForum@culture.gsi.gov.uk – so let them know your thoughts.
For my part, I’ll be emailing about classifications of music and venue – the licencing laws for venues that require them to have thousands of pounds worth of restructuring work for safety reasons seem ludicrous when the act is a solo acoustic guitarist, or bassist, or a piano/sax duo or whatever – in fact, the audience is likely to be far more static and orderly for that kind of event than they would in an ordinary pub! Lumping together all music as a job lot for licencing is nuts – I think there’s still some sort of ‘two in a bar’ ruling that means you can have solo acts and duos, but I think the ruling changed… need to look that one up. Anyone with any insight, feel free to post over in the forum.
Soundtrack – Steve Lukather and Larry Carlton, ‘Live’; Gillian Welch, ‘Time (The Revelator)’.
if you’re having a bad week, console yourself that you’re not famous for riding a fake ostrich…
What was Bernie Clifton all about? Did anyone ever find him funny?
Soundtrack – Green Day, ‘International Superhits’.
I’ve not written any new music for quite a while. It’s not a problem – most areas of music tend to happen in terms of flurries of activity followed by plateaus, whether it be technique, concepts, composition or whatever. And right now, I’m working on arrangements of other people’s tunes – something I’ve done very little of as a solo player. I used to do a short version of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ to finish gigs, and these days do ‘People Get Ready’, and now have just worked out a lovely solo arrangement of ‘What A Wonderful World’. I’ve also been working on a version of This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody), the Talking Heads track, which sounds great, but is really hard to play!! I need to make sure it’s well hammered into my skull before I attmept it live. It involves some pretty tricky looping (well, tricky for me…)
So I’m having fun with other people’s tunes (and maybe I’ll finally get round to having a go at ‘The Fish’ – something I’ve had a number of people nagging me to do for a while (yes, you, Catherine Street Team and California Bob!)
And as an off-shoot, I’ve got the beginnings of a new tune. It might end up as a solo piece, or maybe in one of the collaborations. This Monday Theo and I met up with a fantastic drummer called Andrew Booker. Andrew has his own duo/trio (recorded thus far as a duo, now have a guitarist as well) called Pulse Engine, whose CD is really cool (bass and drums duo, with Andrew singing like a less-heliumed John Anderson).
Anyway, he plays a tiny electronic kit, and adjusts really well to the slight imperfections of my loops, so we’ll hopefully be launching said trio on the listening public before too long – playing the tracks from Open Spaces with a drummer certainly took them into a very different space…
So, despite the famine, much creative noodling is taking place, and many new avenues are opening up…
Soundtrack – Bill Frisell, ‘Ghost Town’; Theo Travis, ‘Slow Life’; Jonatha Brooke, ‘Live’; Julie Lee, ‘Stones’; Pulse Engine, ‘Polarised’.
Tonight was gig 3 for me in a Jonatha month. Of course, she was fabulous. Played beautifully, sang like an angel, bantered with the audience and wore a particularly groovy pair of bright coloured boots!
This was the first of three consecutive Tuesdays at The 12 Bar on Denmark Street in central london. Please please please go and see her at one of the next two (15th and 22nd March, just in case you couldn’t work that out!) – I’ll be there again on the 22nd. By that time I’ll have racked up about one healthy two hour set’s worth of material (though I’ll have heard a few of the songs four times!) Go on, I promise it’ll be a magic night out.
Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ‘Live’; Bruce Cockburn, ‘Nothing But A Burning Light’.
tonight was a Soul Space service at St Luke’s – Soul Space is very much along the lines of the stuff I’ve been involved with at Grace for many years, in that it dispenses with trad ideas about service format and instead uses music/video/projection and installation to explore a theme in a more creative, left-brain, open ended artsy way than the more didactic, prescriptive right-brain version of church we’re all more familiar with.
This evening’s theme was ‘Tree Of Life’ – taken from the theme for this year’s Greenbelt Festival, and we were looking at the idea of connectedness – branches being connections across the world to the global community and roots being a connection with our past, ancestors, tradition etc.
My part was to provide much ambient goo to underscore the whole thing, along with Techie Dave, who provided a few basic loops for us to build the goo from, taken from the One Giant Leap DVD. We also used the two singles from One Giant Leap – Braided Hair and whatever the other one with Maxi Jazz and Robbie Williams in is called. So the loops were in the same key as the songs so we could bring them in and out…
The audio highlight of the evening was the opening 10 minutes in which a recording of Meg reading Jesus’ Genealogy (that long list of names at the beginning of the book of Matthew) which was run into my loop set up so that while I was providing goo I could also loop chunks of Meg’s reading, and feed them into the loops, reversing them, processing them, and creating a more other-worldly effect with the initial recording. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I hope I get to do much more of it! I’ll post here when the next one is in case you fancy coming along! And there may well be some photos that appear from tonight on Vicar Dave’s Blog.
…I went to see Gary Husband’s Force Majeure play at Ronnie Scott’s last night. It was their last night at the venue, and it seems like they saved the best til last. Another breath-takingly good set – incredible levels of musicianship, some beautiful writing, and the most marvellous interplay between the musicians. Definitely one of the finest instrumental groups I’ve ever seen anywhere.
Tonight they were in Gainsborough, so only Manchester and Gateshead to go – PLEASE GO AND SEE THEM PLAY!!
Before the gig last night I was supposed to be going to Jonny and Jenny’s joint 40th birthday, got part of the way there and heard an announcement on the radio the whole of the Hammersmith area was gridlocked by a traffic accident. Turned round and went home, only to be told that it cleared up a lot quicker than radio-lady made it sound. Bugger.