I haven’t been the best at publicising so as a summary here’s a playlist of the project so far:
I decided to play around with a couple of synths, a bit of MIDI, a handmade BEW pedal and see what happened. This is the result. In the process I taught myself a couple of new things about recording too. I got to the end of the lyrics and realised I really ought to have rewritten the first verse but time was not on my side. So have at thee. Guest vocals by Becca Allen.
Entry number 4 in the ongoing compendium is a lovely floaty piece of acoustic art-pop. Should I feel a bit self-conscious in calling it art-pop? Nope! No prizes for guessing my references for the voice parts.
SAWFAY number 3. I tried to use as few guitars and as many basses as possible and this is the result. I’m quite enjoying only using acoustic guitars in these compositions, especially for the lead or harmonic sections. I’m still a bit shy about singing though.
OK, 2nd week. I completely forgot to post this here at the time -the 7th of November.
Initially I had a problem with my mix, the whole piece was overdriven once I’d exported it from my DAW. Eventually I discovered that somehow SoundForge is boosting the gain of everything it opens, even the preview feature in the File Open dialog. This piece is perhaps a wee homage to both Tortoise and David Bedford.
Two of m’colleagues are discussing banning cars in the centre of Belfast. A quarter-mile radius where only buses & delivery vehicles are permitted. Build massive out-of-town car parks. First they wanted to make the buses free within the exclusion zone, but then they decided that the buses should not be free so as to incentivise bike travel.
Yesterday in the news, there were reports that Belfast is in crisis and has run out of office space. Invest NI commissioned the report after commercial agents warned of this “crisis”. These are the same commercial agents who have hundreds of empty office units on their books across the city and who refuse to invest in their own future by renovating existing empty properties and are now demanding public funds to build brand new buildings while their existing empty stock meanders towards dereliction.
How’s about this: instead of having our rapidly shrinking economy milked further in the name of “attracting investment”, how’s about our business leaders start putting their money where their mouths are; invest in upgrading your own properties, develop existing derelict or abandoned spaces as inexpensive multi-story car-parks, and enact a strictly enforced ban on on-street parking with the city centre’s quarter-mile and on any designated bus lane.
[gallery] Sunday was a pleasant day to spend around the mostly deserted Thompson dry dock.
Here’s some photos of the dry dock and the pump house.
Maybe not worth the tenner the bus tour company are charging, but an unavoidable expense now that the area is all fenced off.
Here's some photos of the dry dock and the pump house.
Maybe not worth the tenner the bus tour company are charging, but an unavoidable expense now that the area is all fenced off.
Barry Cullen, Peter Cullen and I were engaged in writing a score for an 80 minute film from 1922. The film, called Wheels of Chance and based on a short story by H.G. Wells, is very much of its time; a comedy of errors and an exploration of the social changes wrought by the rise of the bicycle; the blurring of the lines between classes and the increased freedom bicycles afforded women.
The film was to be shown at a festival was called On Your Bike and it was promoted by the Waterfront and Belfast City Council, although unfortunately it seemed to be a footnote in their marketing.
While we had slightly more than two month’s notice of this project, various difficulties meant that we had about three weeks between receiving the only DVD from the BFI library and the performance date.
Both Barry and I have produced short soundtracks before but these have been simple, non-narrative pieces exploring sonic spaces rather than long-form descriptive movements written to support and explicate a drama.
It’s been a serious learning experience.
Before our final rehearsal I’d thought what we’d end up with would have good moments. The final movement, for example, is really lovely, one of the pursuit sections has evolved into a brilliantly oddball piece of tension, and the theme for the main protagonist is an hilarious earworm of woodwinds, but I thought it would very obviously be a rushed first attempt. For three people with full-time jobs and a good selection of other musical commitments, I thought we’d acquit ourselves well and be not in the least ashamed of what we were to perform.
As it turned out, the final rehearsal saw everything coalesce, everyone brought out the flourishes they’d been thinking about but had yet to unveil. From Sunday morning after we packed up our equipment, the red mist had truly come down - we were cooking and ready to serve the beef.
But I have to say, writing a film score for a silent movie is very, very difficult.
For a movie post-“2001: A Space Odyssey” the task is fundamentally different. Hell, “Lawrence of Arabia” marked a sea-change in movie making as far back as 1962, but David Lean’s radical advances were only really starting to become mainstream by the time Coppola filmed The Godfather in 1972. Digressions aside, the cinema I’m used to is so far removed from that of 1922 as to be a wholly different language, a separate art form.
There are no tracking or panning shots. There are no mood-setting wide shots. Rarely does scene lasts much longer than 10 or 15 seconds without being broken up by on-screen dialogue and if it does it has fixed camera placement for its duration. Every single shot contains one or more of the main characters so there is little scope for pure ambience or mood-setting.
In the process what we have learned about themes, motifs, key changes, reaction themes, timbre, texture, phrasing, tonality, voicing, repetition, suggestion, variation (to name but a few) would fill a thick volume. But we’d do it again like a shot.
The film was shown in the Waterfront Studio, Belfast at 6pm on Sunday 4th September, its first screening for around 90 years, while we performed our new work live (more details here). I don’t think either Barry or Pete would contradict me in saying there were a fair amount of jangling nerves pre-show…
Once we got going though, apart from a couple of (ahem) technical issues such as playing to a different edit of the movie than that to which we’d written and rehearsed our score, we came good and presented a much better piece than we expected to nothing but praise and applause from the audience.
