this week has been spent between my studio where i’ve been preparing the guitars and uni helping people and building/painting my plinth. the only disaster could have been bad when i walked in to find Maff had taken two sides of my plinth and sawed them to make a shelf for his projector. well that was awkward. could have been nasty but thankfully i had two spare sides by pure luck at my studio. so slightly stressed at having to re-build it.. it could have been much worse. we’re friends still.

so as the first week is over, the guitars are finished equipped with sensors, LED’s and speakers ready to bring to university to attach to the plinth. I finally made a break through with my max/MSP patch and it works now so i’m so glad. Hoping that no other disaster happens, I’ll be spending monday tuesday and wednesday tweaking the sculpture in the space ready for marking… in the meantime i need a bath and two days sleep.. but sadly i’ll only get the bath. sleep will have to wait.

Whenever I decide to do a project.. it usually means i commit whatever it takes.. sometimes it’s for the better and sometimes it’s plain stupid. Two years ago [just over] I was asked by a friend and fellow musician in Belfast to make a music video for a song that had been selected for a film soundtrack. The film was Cherrybomb, starring Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame. It was filmed in Northern Ireland and local lad David Holmes was in charge of the soundtrack. Robyn G. Shiels was asked to be on the soundtrack and his dark haunting song Hello Death was chosen.

It had been a few years since I had properly been making music videos.. Chewie Films had declined.. I was uncertain of what I was doing but I knew I wanted to get back to doing more traditional animation.. so when Robyn asked me to make a video for him I was stoked. As a big fan of his music I was excited.. and this was intended to be the music video to bring me back on par, put me back in the game. Now I feel like it might be the glorious tombstone on my time as a music video director. The one final masterpiece to say ‘it’s over’. Who knows.  This video happened through much determination, thought and perhaps avoidance.. but I new it had to be made. Two years later and beautifully finished to coincide with the songs release, I am proud I have finished this. I am proud of it. It’s great to hear that people are digging it. Hello Death can be finally put to rest. As I finish my Masters course I put it aside and move on to other things.. but maybe it isn’t the end.. maybe this is the start of something .. but until the summer.. who knows?

Whilst researching for my dissertation, this caught my eye as a lovely monument in Frankfurt for the international sociologist, philosopher and musicologist, Theodor W. Adorno. It is his desk, chair and other few artefacts on display in public. Quite the change from having them in the more expected place of a museum.

This week we were introduced to Slavoj Žižek at theoretical class. Although it felt a bit irrelevant to our studies I actually find the guy really interesting. We were asked to get our heads around his short collection of essays called Welcome to the Desert of the Real, written about the 9/11 attacks.

His excited manner puts various politics and thought in contexts in ways where no-one is saved from his criticism whether it’s about fundamentalism, fascism or capitalism.. he’s got something to say against it all… even liberalism.

I’ll not get into the politics here.. but he’s worth a read.. in fact, he is worth a look online just to see him speak and how he gestures and constantly moves whilst reeling off his continuous ideas. go check him out.

It was a fascinating experiment, walking down the same streets but focusing on the sounds around rather than going inward to our thoughts, or putting in our earphones to block out the multitude of city noise. Brighton, for all the size of it, is quite a noisy place and the dramatic changes from streets to the quiet of pavilion gardens, to the roar of the sea was quite an insight at what we usually block out.

With currently striving for seemingly impossible quiet time, I decided to go to somewhere of peace and solitude and record something a little more peaceful than the busy streets. Myself and Marie went to the impressive St. Bartholomew’s Church (said to be built based on the dimensions of the Noah’s Ark and perhaps the tallest parish in Europe). Whilst the church was briefly empty, I stood at the front, and Marie at the back recording myself singing some vocals capturing the reverb in the immense space. The recordings were too quiet, a lesson learned. I guess my strong point was always visuals. We went to a different church the next day, St Michael’s, and re-recorded the same vocals and they came out better.

I experimented with them, making a choir out of solo vocals. have a listen to the track here:

As the workshop came to a close I had only begun with using the vocals in a more electronic fashion and there is something there to be developed. Since writing the song Mon Peu Rimbaud I have begun to be interested more in what can be done with vocals and this was a step towards how this might influence my music. Instead of re-working the samples I have recorded a newly written song called Home, which seemingly sparse at the beginning, flourishes into a choir of vocals at various points. It can have a soothing effect that aptly suits the church atmosphere, albeit in a non-religious way. I would post it here… but it’s not quite ready for the public yet.

After the busy crowd left the private view I took a quick photo… of my photos. This is the exhibition in Geisha Arts as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial Fringe 2010. Organised by a few friends in the MA Photography course (including the wonderful Joan), the show consists of seven artists around the theme of Trans… (transform, transient, transparency etc). My theme was transfixed, and although intending to create new work for the show, I decided to display a selection of work taken from the past year with my new found interest in medium format photography.

My work has always centred around music and when i began using the medium format camera… I naturally saw its square format as a potential for artwork for albums. Displayed in PVC slip covers for vinyl records, I am exhibiting four medium format photos, printed to 12″ size as ideas for album artwork. It’s a developing project and hopefully one day I will use the medium format camera to create photography used on a real album cover. But until then, catch the exhibition at Geisha Arts, 75-79 East Street in Brighton.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew the various work through printed books and had seen an exhibition of Lighter New Works at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, 2008. I had never really looked into the photographer, and he had always remained a bit of a mystery. But giving a talk about his career in photography gave a clear overview of his development. The talk was quite relaxed beginning with his fascination with the photocopied image. He claimed to have used half of his Turner Prize money on his own photocopier. The images had a rough and ready quality inevitable from photocopying but still a curious aesthetic at the same time. You use whatever mediums you have available to you to create the work, and the art becomes more about the creating, rather than striving to be something.

Although the work in the Hamburger Bahnhof struck me at the time as being very different from what I had seen before (the exhibition contained his Blushes series, and his table works), it became evident that his work has developed and changed over the years, always trying out new ideas and styles. It’s good to see this constant exploration, always creating and capturing what fascinates him.