Apartment 11 - the evidence

Hullo internet chums! You may remember that, a short while ago, I was commissioned to do sound design for a short film called The Writer. Well, a lot of sonic water has passed under the cinematic bridge since that time, and it is now my privilege to unveil four short vignettes from said film, which has now been retitled Apartment 11. All of the sound that you will hear was recorded and mixed by me, in y stwdio.

Edit: I've been told to take these videos down, due to the possibility of distribution deals or some such. If I'm ever allowed to put them back up, I shall do. I'll upload some replacement, audio-only, snippets over the next couple of days. Examples of my work are still available on my portfolio page.

So there we have it! The film itself is in the final stages of post-production, and will be premiered at the Quad in Derby this June. Look out for it then, pop pickers.

New music / video / anti-communist propaganda piece

May I present to you, dear reader, a small taster of the forthcoming night of film and music which I am curating at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. A night that you can come to and experience for yourself! It's on the 16th of March don't you know.

This sneak preview is entitled 'How to out-psych the psychos who sucked out your psyche', and it concerns the venal, anti-American socialist tendencies that were rampant throughout the 1950s. It's enough to send shivers down your spine, it really is...



Enjoy, and see you on the 16th! More information forthcoming.

We made a Jecklin disk!

Did we?

Yes!



The above is a video that we took during the Bmus3 (& Ed) Recording Studies class the week before last. An excellent time was had by all, and a useful bit of kit was made, which will hopefully serve the college well in years to come...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jecklin_Disk

Ooh, spooky: "Ghosts before breakfast"

So I decided I wanted to make a video for my hot new sample-based project Yaoi! Attack. But then I thought... why go to all the trouble, when you can just co-opt visuals from a classic piece of 1920s experimental German cinema?

Well exactly.

That being the case,  I present to you my take on Hans Richter's Ghosts before Breakfast, a revolutionary abstract film from 1927.



As ever, I built the track up from a few unrelated mp3s taken from my itunes library (although i did cheat a little here by cherry-picking the samples, rather than leaving their choice up to the gods of fate as I technically should). Also, I added good few little sound effects and extra touches of my own. If you're interested though, the basic recipe for this song is: r dean taylor + charles mingus + mogwai + seasick steve + volcano! + the lucksmiths + modest mussorgsky. Yum!

By the way, you can download the track here..

Wail to God

Hullo. In today's blog, we'll be looking at animation. Or rather, one specific animation: Anthony F Scheppard's cartoon-horror video for the Ape School track Wail to God. Having first stripped the video of its original sonic context, I composed my own sound design to it. I thought it would be interesting to take a piece of footage that had originally been composed to some music, and try to reverse-imagineer the process. Anyhey, the results are below. Enjoy, have fun, and stay safe!



(the original video, featuring the psychy-pop melodies of Ape School (buy! buy! buy!), can be found here)

Notes on an installation

Hey! It's me!

So we pretty much put an installation on yesterday, as part of RWCMD's Open House Day & 60th Birthday celebrations. It was super-rad, and anyone who missed it really should take a long hard look at themselves.

...but wait! By expedient chance, latecomers and the infirm have an opportunity to watch the following short video, which gives one the opportunity to experience the performance as if one had really been there! And all at no extra cost to the viewer!

Here it is: 'Bored Meeting'..



The idea was to recreate the quasi-hallucinatory dream state that the human mind often chooses to occupy during particularly long and tedious meetings. We've all been there I'm sure: it's where we are when we doodle on our expensive-looking jotters, or look out of the window, or try to see how many staplers we can fit up one nostril without the boss noticing.

(...more after the break...)

Experiment 2: in which I done a video

Bonjour, mes amis. These 3 videos are going to form part of another installation I'm doing at college next Saturday. They're going to be played on 3 video screens in one corner of an office room- the idea being that they're each one side of a corporate video-conferencing session that's going a bit wrong.

There'll be other stuff going on inside the room as well. Super secret stuff. The sound was made using a motion-tracking pd patch very similar to the one below, except this time it's to pre-composed video rather than a live stream.. anyway here are the videos. Enjoy!

(for best results, please feel free to watch all 3 at the same time...)


Sophie Tilley, live from Madrid


Jack Melham, all the way from sunny San Francisco


Matt McDade, lost and confused in Tokyo

Experiment 1: in which a live video is streamed and gibberish is heard

Blatantly not been updating this here, mainly due to watching far too many Rodney Mullen videos on youtube over the past couple of weeks. However, I have been doing stuff, and stuff.

Here is some of it.



This is a test patch I've made in PureData for one of a pair of installations I'm aiming to put on in college at the open house day next week. At the moment it's called 'Catchphrase', after the BBC learn-Welsh podcast many of the samples are from.

Audio samples containing an instruction, suggestion or Welsh-based fact are set off at random intervals between 3 and 9 seconds. Meanwhile, a gem window detects movement in front of a fixed camera, tracking the image's centre of gravity. This tracker sets off letters from the Welsh alphabet (ordered from right to left in the above video, but left to right for the user), banging out a midi note in Logic at the same time. The alphabet-samples are pitchshifted higher if the movement is at the top of the screen, and lower as the centre of gravity moves further towards the bottom. Oh, and there's a bit of reverb and delay. And the next alphabet-sample won't get set off until the one before it has finished (it just got silly otherwise). And, err.. that's it.

It's not fantastically musical or anything, but it has a certain level of interaction, and given another week will hopefully be quite good, and also fun for people to wander past in the CMT corridor.

More experiments and, eventually, finished business to follow. Also, we absolutely have to video the boomwhacker piece and get that shit on youtube.

(edit - good lord, that video really doesn't need to be 3 minutes long, does it?)

Avey Tare & Panda Bear vs Federico Fellini

So here's a little video I made for Avey Tare & Panda Bear's song 'April & The Phantom', using bits cut out of 'La Dolce Vita'...

I was trying to be a bit William Burroughs and make something like those videos the Books do for their music. It's a bit raggedy round the edges, but then so's the song itself, and that's why I like it.