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Well my radio show was a bit of a shambles, what with me being a bottle of wine down and not really having a clue what buttons to press on the console, but I am well happy with the format, and I think I might do one of these fashionable 'podcasts' - stitch it together on home studio, so there can be a bit more structure on it rather than just randomly slamming together bits and bobs... I thought my ending of Kanye West's Def Poetry Jam version of 'All Falls Down' running into a Viv Stanshall as Sir Henry Rawlinson in some bizarre pro-colonial rant worked a treat though. Got in touch with lots of writers too, who are all keen on the idea - most didn't manage to get me recordings of them reading their work in time (well duh, they're writers), but have already suggested some very interesting ideas and angles and want to be involved in future. The bits I recorded of my classmates' work worked fantastically well - recording them in cafes and outdoors at college with lots of ambient background sound gave it all a very 'alive' feel and blended well with the drifting music I put behind them; it all reminded me how much I loved doing Orb / KLF mixtapes when I was 16/17, chucking in bits of dialogue from Twin Peaks and whatnot. Those were always popular with even non-pot-smoking schoolmates, and I see no reason why this format that I'm working on now shouldn't appeal to more than just an artsy audience. I know ambient is not really even a genre any more - in the UK, at least - but there's obviously an audience for more 'considered' music, judging by Radio 1's Blue Room show and Radio 3's Late Junction and Mixing It. I think podcasting is the ideal medium, certainly better than doing it, for example, in a bar or club backroom, as the stories and poems rather benefit from actual listening... and everyone is so constantly attached to their mp3 player headphones nowadays, there's a captive audience waiting to tap into. The feedback I've had from the hour-long mixes here has suggested that people actually listen more intently when you give them a solid block of stuff - if I've given people compilation CDs before they've tended to just shove the tracks on an i-Pod and listen to them as they come up randomly, whereas if they do the same with an hour mix they'll obviously listen to it from beginning to end, and remember individual tracks better.
I finally got the bulk of my record collection back from Mark's place in Brighton where they've been in storage for the last three years or something, and put them in _moggy_'s mum's loft - bar a couple of bags that I brought home and have been joyfully ploughing through with nostalgic glee. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful music! I'll put some of them on tonight's mix. Not entirely sure how much of the weirder stuff I'm going to be able to 'play out' any more though, as I'm thinking I might have to give up or cut down the Sundays... I love the sessions so much (wonderful soundsystem, great venue) but the money's shit, and after I played at a party at a pub round the corner on Friday night, the landlord there offered me 100 quid to play there every Saturday, meaning that I'd be doing Friday, Saturday, Sunday every week which is just not conducive to marital bliss or a functioning liver.
Finally 'broke the seal' as it were with my first major assessed piece for the course; well, I'd written a few pages before as a sort of warm-up, but I knew all along that they were far too impersonal, descriptive and bland. The actual piece is going to have to have much more action in it, I really have to get my hands dirty in an emotional sense. I'd been really avoiding getting stuck into it for ages, not because I didn't know how to write it but because it's kind of confessional and I won't come out of it smelling of roses, so I was being a bit cowardly. This problem I solved by becoming very, very pissed before writing. I got a great reminder that being interested in writing technique and the investigative stuff and character studies that go with it is not just self-indulgence when I was chatting about my course to a friend who had done time in Feltham when he was younger. He said that prison (ok, young offenders institute) is the one place in the world where poetry is more important to people than television, and that the writing workshops were the one medium where people EVER spoke to each other without confrontational machismo - and the actual evidence shows that it's one of the most powerful tools for helping people think their way out of identities that are based on robbing and violence... Yes, I know it's hardly going to transform my life and personality or anything but a) this course leads to lots of opportunities for getting work doing teaching in schools, prisons, etc - something I reckon I could do, and b) if I take the course seriously, it can't be done without being honest with myself, being willing to look a right prick in print (yes, not something I've had a problem with in the past etc etc), and confronting some painful home truths. Perhaps that IS self-indulgence. I dunno.
The things that it seems like a good idea to photgraph and mail to yourself when you're drunk... what was I thinking? Why did I have my phone in the bath?
I finally got the bulk of my record collection back from Mark's place in Brighton where they've been in storage for the last three years or something, and put them in _moggy_'s mum's loft - bar a couple of bags that I brought home and have been joyfully ploughing through with nostalgic glee. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful music! I'll put some of them on tonight's mix. Not entirely sure how much of the weirder stuff I'm going to be able to 'play out' any more though, as I'm thinking I might have to give up or cut down the Sundays... I love the sessions so much (wonderful soundsystem, great venue) but the money's shit, and after I played at a party at a pub round the corner on Friday night, the landlord there offered me 100 quid to play there every Saturday, meaning that I'd be doing Friday, Saturday, Sunday every week which is just not conducive to marital bliss or a functioning liver.
Finally 'broke the seal' as it were with my first major assessed piece for the course; well, I'd written a few pages before as a sort of warm-up, but I knew all along that they were far too impersonal, descriptive and bland. The actual piece is going to have to have much more action in it, I really have to get my hands dirty in an emotional sense. I'd been really avoiding getting stuck into it for ages, not because I didn't know how to write it but because it's kind of confessional and I won't come out of it smelling of roses, so I was being a bit cowardly. This problem I solved by becoming very, very pissed before writing. I got a great reminder that being interested in writing technique and the investigative stuff and character studies that go with it is not just self-indulgence when I was chatting about my course to a friend who had done time in Feltham when he was younger. He said that prison (ok, young offenders institute) is the one place in the world where poetry is more important to people than television, and that the writing workshops were the one medium where people EVER spoke to each other without confrontational machismo - and the actual evidence shows that it's one of the most powerful tools for helping people think their way out of identities that are based on robbing and violence... Yes, I know it's hardly going to transform my life and personality or anything but a) this course leads to lots of opportunities for getting work doing teaching in schools, prisons, etc - something I reckon I could do, and b) if I take the course seriously, it can't be done without being honest with myself, being willing to look a right prick in print (yes, not something I've had a problem with in the past etc etc), and confronting some painful home truths. Perhaps that IS self-indulgence. I dunno.
The things that it seems like a good idea to photgraph and mail to yourself when you're drunk... what was I thinking? Why did I have my phone in the bath?