AudioBunny Blog

I went to Brighton College y/day to see the William Kentridge exhibition. Is was OK but didn’t blow me away except for the 3D weird lense drawings which I thought were very good.

However what really interested me were two films playing near the cafeteria by some bloke called Peter Tscherkassky. He is part of a group of Austrian avant garde filmmakers/artists and his films were full-on cut-ups of found footage reinterpreted and re-photographed to create a different meaning.

He says:

“There are three factors that influence my work permanently: working with found footage, working directly on the film stock (together with the possibility of physical manipulation of the film) and, in general, the capacity of the film medium to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere”.

Basically the films are very immediate, accessible, beautiful looking black & white flickering film cut-ups sometimes using the actual stock as raw material, very fast moving and quite extreme. The sound also mirrored this method, repeating jumpy phrases and very rough as well, very emotional and gutteral. Peter Tscherkassky is doing a masterclass as part of the CineCity film programme on Sun, so I’m going to that.

Since last night I’ve been watching The Filth and the Fury, the Sex Pistols film by Julien Temple, over and over. Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones; what fucking stars they are. And what amazing music that seemed to come from nowhere, on TV shows with the likes of god awful bands like Kansas, at number 1 above the Eagles’ Hotel California, coming up with God Save the Queen for the jubilee. An incredible tale. I was in tears on the bus with the story of the demise of Sid Vicious, but the whole thing, the attitude and the music gave me so much energy and together with the Peter Tscherkassky films got me thinking about pushing my music and film more, being more emotionally direct, being more extreme and experimental, use more of the energy I’ve always got from noise and music.

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

I found this today whilst researching film/TV composition methods: it’s composer Angelo Badalamenti talking about his creative relationship with David Lynch. Interview by Daniel Schweiger from Film Score Sept 2001. It illustrates the way the director’s expresses himself and communicates with the composer. Stuff about David Lynch always makes me laugh.

“When David and I were working on the Laura Palmer theme for Twin Peaks, he would sit next to me at the keyboard. In a very soft and expressive way, he said, “Angelo, the music should begin very dark and slow. Imagine that you’re all alone in the dark woods, and the only sounds you hear are the wind and the soft cry of an owl. It’s kind of scary, and the music should haunt and mesmerize you.” Then I would start playing it, and David would say, “That’s it. That’s it. Play it slower. That’s so beautiful. Now you see a beautiful teenage girl in the distance, and she’s coming out from behind a tree. She’s all alone and so troubled. Now take that darkness and go into a beautiful melody.” I would change the musical colors, and build them ever so slowly until they reached a climax, and David would be saying, “Oh, it’s so beautiful! You’re tearing my heart out, Angelo!”

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

Number one of an occassional series: ‘Photos taken on my mobile by my kids that I find later by accident’

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

Last Friday saw the opening of the Pause film/music/sound exhibition at the Phoenix Art Gallery in Brighton. I had a terrible cold and was very tired & exhausted. Still I solved the problem by getting wrecked. It turned out to be a very special night; lots of friends and people I didn’t know mingled, and my family turned up too. We went on to the George in Trafalgar St to celebrate.

All the films seemed to go down well. The place was really full and the drink was flowing. The ‘Three of a Kind’ film in our specially constructed cinema went down really well and me and Gary were very pleased with people’s responses. So much so, that we’ve started work on a DVD to send out all over the place - I think the piece has a good future if we can just get it out there. I’ll upload it in the next few weeks.

Most of the artists and filmmakers joined together and got the exhibition up and ready on time in really good communal way. It was excellent to be a part of it all.

It was also very rewarding and interesting to hear my sound I’d created in the public place of the toilets. It was amusing to see people standing around the toilets, listening. In the week before I had to rewrite a lot of it, as the original idea of having my Musical Poem pieces in there didn’t work that well. Basically, I learn’t that you have to work with the space, and not force stuff on it: sound that is busy, has a lot going on, didn’t work, whereas more open, ambient, ambiguous sound works better in the echoey space of a toilet. I would say that 60% of it works; it was an experiment and a chance to learn on the job, so it has been really useful in that regard.

I look forward to creating the next ‘public place’ sound installation.

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

It was one day in Sept as the sun was going down, and very beautiful and calm.

Anyone been in since? Seems like a long time ago. Strange how your brain just seems to forget things like this when the winter comes…

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

I was off to work in the West Byfleet shop today, but missed my train so decided to go to the cafe opposite the station. I like the food in this cafe, but it is often empty, or when there are people in it, it feels empty anyhow.

What disturbed me about this cafe, apart from the way the waitress looked like Mad Thora, a girlfriend from my teens, who was mental, was the TV up high in the corner. It was playing ‘The Hits’ - an MTV - like show, playing music videos by Girls Aloud, Avril Lavigne etc. You get the picture I’m sure. The added ‘bonus’ to this show was viewers being able to call/text in and say whose celebrity relationship was hot, or not.

Obviously most people would find such a TV show horrible/depressing/sad/offensive, like I did. Why was it on? What purpose did it serve? Was it meant to make the cafe hip? Girls Aloud? The show itself is a slick yet sad Daily Sport type of affair aimed at God knows who - perhaps some 11 year old somewhere. Not here in the cafe though. It reminded me of Jack Black in School of Rock ranting about how rock n’ roll has always been about sticking it to the man, and then along came MTV, and rock became a product. Now it’s always been a product in some way, but obviously MTV dumbed it down to the level of a pre-pubescent teenager posing in front of the mirror, and then took away any real threat of rebellion or feeling that music was kind of like windows into an alternative way to live. That left a vacuum you can FEEL when you sit in a cafe waiting for a train. That’s not all though, because that vacuum at the heart of music video TV has been filled by the same old aspirational good looks, young beauty, hot cars, badass attitude that popular culture loves to revel about and perpetuate.

But that’s not all there is to popular music. I think of music as separate and different from the over-marketed angle we are fed. What if the marketing people and the program makers have got it wrong, and we’re not the accepting dumb 11 year old they want us to be. In fact it’s not even a 11 year old thing - my kids would find such programs difficult to stomach. It’s more like an intelligence thing.

But back to sitting in the cafe waiting for my train. I was thinking, why don’t people question what having MTV or radio playing adds to their businesses, their environment. People aren’t daft. They shouldn’t be fed this crap when all they wanted was a break, a cup of tea, some food, some time to collect their thoughts.

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

Don’t know if this is going to work but I just registered this blog on BlogCatalog.com

Now let’s see who comes to visit…

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

Almost finished on a soundscape in Second Life which features a bleak deserted house by the sea. It’s been a completely different writing experience as obvious music doesn’t work as a aural background in SL. Why people use internet streaming radio on their land I don’t know, as it is a quick cheap fix which doesn’t add anything and often ruins what they’ve built.

I’ve found that you have to be fairly subtle, building it up in layers, and basically play around, moving bits of sound about, as you would if you had just moved into a new house and had to arrange the furniture.

It’s not quite there yet as I tend to add too much sound in, and then when I’m in SL I find that it can be too intrusive, and have to strip the sound back. It’s a learning and inventing-type of process at the moment, but creating emotive sound environments is basically what I’ve always done. I’ve also learn’t a lot recently from the sound installation I’ve just done in the Phoenix Art Galleries toilets (!). More on that soon.

I’m keen though to get the SL aural environment ECommerce business up and running soon, with a selection of different soundscapes for people to buy.

What I would love to do is to build soundscapes for someone else’s land or a whole sim, so if anyone’s reading this and would like me to design an aural environment for them, at a competitive rate, please contact me and we can discuss it. It could be an excellent opportunity for both parties.

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment

Come see and hear my work at the Pause film exhibition at the Phoenix art gallery in Brighton. I have two pieces showing, one made with the filmmaker Gary Barber and one purely music: ‘Three of a Kind’ is 3 shorts playing in a mini cinema we have created complete with original seating, and ‘Musical Poems’, which is music and sound I’ve created for the toilets (!). This piece is kind of like a collage of music, sound, and spoken word.

This work was broadly influenced by early American country and folk, classical minimalism, Cindy Sherman’s film still photographs, and sound and noise in general.

The people speaking the words also inspired the piece: Allen Ginsberg,
William Carlos Williams and Carl Jung.

Another major influence was the echoey empty sound of the space itself: Some of the originally intended pieces of music didn’t work and new ones had to written and mixed on the spot.

There are a lot of interesting video/audio works playing so why not pop down when you can. See the Phoenix Gallery website for more details on what’s showing.

Share and enjoy!

Post Comment