Apropos of Nothing is now available for a reasonable price at:Conch Records
Real Groovy
Smoke CDs
And here's a link to the official release page at Angry Rabbit.
The tune is dedicated to my dad, Jolyon. The Auckland CD release gig fell on the same day as his 70th birthday and as that kinda ruled out me being in Wellington I promised to dedicate a tune to him. In the event this dedication turned into a whole new tune, custom-built to reflect his musical interests (well, I hope so). I believe he likes it :)
This is a live recording from the Wellington release gig. Stuart recorded it straight from the mixing desk (so it's a good quality recording and no shouty crowd noises).
]]>Apropos of Nothing is now available for a reasonable price at:And here's a link to the official release page at Angry Rabbit.
Featuring :
Jet Jaguar
Malty Media
Group Five
Panoramica
$10 entry ($20 entry and a copy of the CD...)
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Featuring :
Jet Jaguar
Malty Media
Group Five
+ DJ Bignificent D
$10 entry ($20 entry and a lovely copy of the CD!)
]]>I could add that for my own part in the compilation, I've changed the selection of material I've made, so there's a ready track looking for another home. It's called 'Beware of Trains', which may be good advice, but probably not relevant to any musical element in the track. Still, titles for instrumental music are like that. But then, instrumental music is like that too...
]]> I watched the film Music & Lyrics a few days ago, and there was a line that stood out for me, where Drew Barrymore says that "a melody is like seeing someone for the first time. The physical attraction. Sex. But then, as you get to know the person, that's the lyrics. Their story. Who they are underneath." Well, it's got its depth, but it kinda leaves you with the question "what about instrumental music"?(I should be fair: I think the comparison is about song, rather than music in general. Also, it's about melody rather than music in general; and a lot of instrumentalists will no doubt agree with the notion that melody is the "physical attraction" in relation to all else their music has to offer.)
Anyway, I've always liked instrumental music as much as songs. I can't remember not listening to it, whether it were old show tunes performed on the Moog, traditional Irish jigs, or surf rock. I can remember the thrill I felt as a kid when I gradually discovered one of the tracks on an RTR compilation was an instrumental. I can remember the not-complete-frustration I felt when I discovered that both sides of my 'Ghostbusters' 7" were the instrumental B-side (I also discovered that it sounded great at 16rpm).
And then it connects back to what I was saying about titles: I like the story I heard that Vaughan Williams was asked what his Symphony in D minor was about, and he replied that it was about D minor. That's a bit out of my league though; I don't think I could get away with naming a work purely on its musical form. One of the works I've put into the upcoming compilation could, on such terms, be called a "five-voice diminution canon", but that would look far too pretentious as a title for the kind of music I write. I've called it "Hommage à Africa du Toto" instead...
(here's a note about diminution canons. The one I've written is not particularly complex, so take the line about them being "difficult to write" with a grain of salt...)
]]>I've also done a spot of remixing lately. I don't have a lot of experience that way, so it was as much to get something under my belt as anything else - though the total lack of a commercial motive meant I could focus entirely on remixing works of aesthetic worth. Although the works I remixed were both by my good buddy Stuart (Aquaboogie), I still wound up working from the finished products rather than component tracks - so I guess what I did may have been more like writing mash-ups, or just plain old-fashioned sampling.
One of those remixes was just a good laugh among friends - converting one of Stuart's early works into a pastiche of late '80s/early '90s hardcore hip-hop - but the other was a "serious" attempt at remixing his rather fine 'Gravity Loops', from International Travel.
But those working methods constrained what I could do. 'Gravity Loops' has many long and gradually developing lines within it, and though I would have liked to work with some of these they were almost always embedded within yet more developing lines. Thus I ended up with a few key bar-length phrases and came out with a loop-oriented mix, one which I chose to exacerbate by attaching a standard-issue hippyhop break (given epic reverb, to compensate for the loss of the some of the sweep of the original).
I wasn't entirely convinced this was any good at all, certainly not compared to the original. I cobbled on a few cuts from a 7" of my old primary school's orchestra, and sent it off to Stuart for the sake of his curiosity rather than as finished product.
He was taken with it though, for some reason thinking it better than the original (the fool). He got me to finish it off "properly" (but keeping the school orchestra) and then played it out at a Malty Media night at Katipo. That isn't a bad outcome, I guess, though commercial viability is a long way off.
]]>The details: Friday 19 October
While You Were Sleeping presents The New Science
$7 from 8pm; Room 101, downstairs at Bar Bodega
(Click to see the poster)
I'm sharing the bill with familiar bill-sharers Aquaboogie and Octif, and newcomers (to me anyway) Filmic. And I'm airing some new material. It's all good news...
Or perhaps I just make tepid background music for cafés. I just need to get it into more cafés.
I got into doing my own stuff in earnest about 2001, as (bedroom) studio work. I had one track as "Group Five" anthologised the next year and first played live with this name in 2003. Released In Camera (an EP or a mini-album, depending on your expectations as much as anything) in May 2006, and Distant Stations (same again) in August 2007; both self-released as part of the Angry Rabbit "label". Though I normally play my own music, I've pretended to be a DJ on occasion (the most fun was a last-minute unbilled spot opening for the Govett Brewster's Mediarena gig at Indigo in 2004).
Oh yeah, the name Group Five comes from Dian Fossey's book Gorillas in the Mist, after a family group of mountain gorillas (when first identified, group 5 had two silverbacks and a mature blackback whom Fossey named Beethoven, Bartók and Brahms). I was looking for a name and I thought it sounded good at the time, and not at all like a consulting agency, security firm or engineering practice. Such is life. I was probably also wrong about the need for a name in the first place. As for the apes, these days I'm just as interested in gibbons and siamangs - not as smart but more musical (see 'Decline and Fall' on In Camera).
History! I was in a band called MonkeyShuttle with Michael Upton (Jet Jaguar) and Stuart McDonald (Aquaboogie) back in the mid '90s. We were roughly ambient-electronic-experimental, but if we were avant garde it was only as a result of creative differences. We had one achievement - playing live on Radio Active in August 1995 (we also played live to our friends in Stuart's living room, but that wasn't much of an achievement). The Active gig is available for download from Angry Rabbit, and we've supplied lengthy and cynical write-ups to keep you amused if the music doesn't.
When we split up Michael got his solo arse into gear well before me or Stuart, and has actually made a name for himself. I still occasionally muck around with both of them: that should be obvious, seeing I'm in this "Angry Rabbit" thing with Stuart and Michael. As for proper musical collaboration, the biggest muck so far has been the "Roadworks" set with Stuart (with Mr. J on visuals), a return to all that ambient-electronic stuff, but a bit more directed and assured than in the old days. This was played live in February 2004 at Bar Bodega.
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