Something else from my past....Hydropera

In 1996 my friend Jack Packer and I were asked to produce an 18 minute piece of music to accompany a film produced by students at Plymouth University. The film was called Hydropera.  Film Students from Plymouth University had recently been to the Red sea to do some underwater filming. They decided that the film needed some weird old sounds so approached myself and Mr Packer to supply this sound/music. At the time Mr Packer and I were working together as Blister Sound Workshop. Which was us basically making lots of weird and odd sounds in our studio for other people.

We recorded Hydropera in one take on our trusted old Fostex Reel to Reel. We were sent the finished film spent a week or so getting the sounds that we wanted and then one Saturday afternoon we started recording. Just over 18 mins later we had finished. There was no over dubs everything was recorded live onto tape and then mixed. The cranky old equipment used was Yamaha CS-60, Sy-1 Synths. One set of Ring Spanners all hanging from a boom mike stand going through a Melos DE-1 echo unit. Roland R-5 Drum Machine, Roland S-10 Sampler, Yamaha SG 1000 and a couple of Yamaha SPX-90s.

So after rediscovering this piece of work, we have decided to make it available for all you out there. Please feel free to click on the Soundcloud link and download a copy of Hydropera for yourself. Thank you. Its FREE.

http://soundcloud.com/keith-seatman/hydropera/s-olEEc

Napster, Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

Consistently Mediocre and Daydreams is now available to download from 

Napster. As well as Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

Atom IV

Popping into Brighton on September 24th for Splitting the Atom IV at the Green Door Store. My good Friend Mr Jez (Shndg) Stevens is playing that day and invited me along to help out carrying some of his strange old equipment. So a day out at the seaside for me.

Sulky 70s Kid

I recently found a few photos of myself in an old photo album at my Sister's house. I noticed that in a lot of these photo's I looked fed up, grumpy or bored

All these photos as far as I can make out were dated between 1970 and 1975.

Later on in the same week Between the Channels put up a new post. The post was a lovely book called Let's Make Puppets. One of the comments on this post was by Bollops who asked

"Was there a rule back then that said kids must look bored and miserable in photos?"  I've noticed it in so many other "How To..." books of the period.

This struck a chord with me. realising that I looked bored and miserable in quite a few of the old family photos. So with that I have decided to bow to pressure and put a few on my blog. The rest you can find at flckr. As Fearlono said "I've shown you mine, now you show me yours"

After the climbing frame from Hell I now wanted to go home. 
I did not want to be photographed.

As you can see having spent months building this 30in Frigate.
I was over the moon now it was finished.

Yves Marchard/Romain Meffre: The Ruins of Detroit

 

The Ruins of Detroit. Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies 

and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.
The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at 
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very 

last time : being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.
Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

Text and images from Yves Marchard/Romain Meffre's website.

The Ruins of Detroit is Published by Steidi

ISBN-10: 3869300429

ISBN-13: 978-3869300429

A friend of mine recently got a copy of The Ruins of Detroit. Derelict Theatres, Police Stations, Houses, Offices. They are all here. In fact the quality and style of the images is quite staggering. This book is amazing.

In September. Test Transmission Archive Reel 5

A tad delay on this one due to not having a lot of time at the mo. Should be early September. I can tell you that there is music from The Boards of Canada, C-DEK, Monroeville Music Center, Pentangle, The Seekers, Carya Amara, Keith Mansfield, Barry Adamson a super little Stone Tape intro mix and tons more. The man that works in the chip shop is very excited and so is the paper boy, who is I might add made of some fine quality inkjet paper.

Stunnning Eastern Design (SED)

SED Published by Taschen 1990 by Georg C. Bertsch & Ernst Hedler. If you can get hold of a copy definitely worth it. Full of wonderful East German Design.

"Our workers are just rushing out to buy the tasteful, and yet favourably priced goods, which our industry has long since been producing"

Quote taken from the back cover of the book.

The Owl Service x 2

Went out a while back to buy some records and ended up getting two copies of The Owl Service. How lucky was that?

Found objects and Unorthodox contraptions

Up to last week I had never heard of Origamibiro, then Adam Daly  sent me a YouTube link to this wonderful track called Quad Time. Love the use of the old Imperial Typewriter. The text here is from their YouTube post.

Imagine music and video playing a game together. And telling stories at the same time. That's what it's like to experience a performance by audio-visual collective Origamibiro.

The collaborative trio merge found objects, unorthodox contraptions, multi instrumentalism and persistence of vision to create an atmosphere both nostalgic and otherworldly.Together, musicians and producers Tom Hill and Andy Tytherleigh and video artist The Joy of Box make connections between seemingly unrelated elements and create a world that plays the scale of human emotions.With atmosphere oozing from their fingertips, it's no wonder the Dublin Fringe Festival described Origamibiro as "undoubtedly the most original offering of the fringe calendar"This promo marks the first of a new series of av works to come out of the new Origamibiro stable- The BiroBox Workshops. Originally a Nottingham based audio-visual night run by Origamibiro, the Workshops has expanded to become a working space where biro can develop new ideas, experiments and working methods to play live.New album also coming soon...