I’m in Italy now doing this tour too. Those links again…
http://nedrymakesmusic.blogspot.com
http://www.thelineofbestfit.com
Nedry Tour (Italy)
Nedry Tour
I’m on tour with Nedry for a little while now, so my efforts will be going into the Nedry blogs at…
http://nedrymakesmusic.blogspot.com
http://www.thelineofbestfit.com
We’ll be away until June. Check them out!
Improvisation
I have been trying to use my time this week to get back to making music. In truth I’ve been trying to use my time for years to get back to making music. I still make music all the time, that is what I do for a living in fact, nearly everyday, I sit at this computer in my studio with a piano sized keyboard in front of me and various electronics surrounding me and I put together sounds and make music. But I find it is sometimes hard to find the time to spend making music for my own purposes, I guess that’s the case with a million passions transformed into careers.
So I went to see a Chopin exhibition at the British Library last week, and it reminded me of the times I spent when I was younger learning to play the piano. My teacher, Lorna, instilled in me a passion for Chopin when I was at that age, but I was below the skill level necessary to play Chopin’s Etudes which I loved so much and that frustrated me. I would hate practicing them because I couldn’t play them and so I would stare at the piano like I was halfway climbing up a cliff face and it was the overhang that I just couldn’t get past.
Seeing the particular Chopin Etude lying open in front of me in the exhibition in a glass case, reminded me of that feeling. Now I look back on it with a bit more life experience I realise that the open page in front of me now, the soaring triplet melody with the gentle bass accompaniment, had crushed my passion all those years ago. I have always loved to play the piano, to press the keys and to explore the keyboard to try and see it without the bounds of technical ability, period, history, key, structure, all of these cliff faces that hold me back. I love to just press the keys and see what noise they make, good or bad.
With this in mind and with the trivialities of life weighing my mind down this week, I wanted to just play music like that, to lose myself and escape into a landscape that I could explore. A landscape with cliffs and vast oceans maybe, but one where I can fly and they don’t hold me back. So I pulled a dusty suitcase down from the loft, the one I used to carry the old mixer and pedals in when I play improvised music not so long ago. I strung up all the pedals and electrical goodies I could find with my guitar and Max/MSP and I just messed around sending audio where it wasn’t supposed to go and looping things backwards and forwards pushing different sounds into the mix. No rules, no wrong notes, just sounds and noises and all under my control. Before long the whole afternoon had passed I hadn’t noticed it go. I was relaxed and free.
I wanted to share it so I thought I’d put something up. Improvising is a very personal thing and I wouldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hear what I did all day, so I put together a quick little video. I aimed for about 3 minutes, when I finished, it was 15. So I edited it down to 5 minutes with some terrible editing to post up. Sorry about the stupid filter, I got carried away because I only have iMovie and I can’t be bothered to re-render it on this machine. But there it is…
Polo Film
Brendan McNamee at Blunt Films gave me a call this week and invited me to help him with a film he’s got planned for the Bicycle Film Festival. So I loaded up and jumped on the new ‘location bike’ and we went down into South London to help execute the plan.
I’m not giving you any clues about what the outcome is going to be yet but I used some experimental recording techniques with some binaural mics whilst Brendan played polo. Got some really good sounds so watch this space because hopefully it’s going to be a really interesting little film.
Nedry – Condors
My good friends Matt and Chris have been making music for years now. Their latest project with Ayu has started snowballing in the media so it’s about time I joined the band wagon and shared this album.
Condors is a beautiful changing landscape of gentle synths, glitchy atmospheres and powerful rhythms and bass sounds. They have been reviewed as somewhere between The XX and Burial, but I really enjoy the interspersions of guitar and drawn out half-time rhythms more reminiscent of post-rock than a pop/dubstep crossover. Either way, and if you prefer the electronic/dubstep side or the epic post-rock side, they sit on a fence that makes them accessible to anyone who likes good music.
Nedry have just got back from their tour in Japan and have recently signed with Monotreme Records. The album has been properly re-released now and is available from the label, from most good record shops and from Amazon too. They will be on tour in the UK in April/May (partially with 65daysofstatic) and I will be joining them. There are also as yet unconfirmed European dates coming up over the Summer. So check it out.
http://www.nedrymakesmusic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/nedrymakesmusic
