the biggest thing i’m struggling with
is what style you’d say the music is.
i like to work in good beats but
i wouldn’t say you could dance to it.
the storytelling is too abstract to be folk.
it doesn’t hit you hard enough to be rock.
but i dance to it
and it is my story
and i rock the hell out of
this little room
in this little flat
on this little island
making it.
and i suppose that matters more than whatever it will eventually be called.
Auto-tune is such crack. I can’t shake this tune from my head:
Yay for reducing even the intimate medium of singing into something even a machine can do! 
This one is similarly addictive:
just spent the last week doing SXSW for the first time. i should clarify that i did not showcase but was just attending for the panels and to scout out the showcases to get ideas in case i apply to play there in the next couple years. i worried it wouldn’t be worth the cost of the badge and the travel but it turned out to be well worth it. the panels were outstanding and i learned a lot from them. one of the most valuable things was just seeing and meeting people that make up the music industry…it’s always been such an abstract thing to me before but i have a much better feel for who’s who and what they do now. i get back to london on thursday and i’m looking forward to taking the momentum i have coming out of sxsw and putting it into finishing this cd. highlights of the week include:
* arc attack – i’m so proud of parsec and his team. i saw their show twice downtown and was just blown away.
* metallica – got to see them in a barbeque joint! incredible show. and they played mostly OLD OLD songs which is all the stuff that i learned to play guitar on (master of puppets, sanitarium, one, seek and destroy, etc). it was amazing to be there as a musician and get to see the guys that got me started playing guitar 18 years ago.
* tori amos – hot
* amanda palmer (from Dresden Dolls) – even hotter than tori amos!
* MY FIANCE – even hotter than amanda palmer! she had a really really tough week but was incredibly supportive of me traveling for the conference. i can’t wait to get back and do what i can to support her.
* monotonix – i got 1) hit by a trash can by the singer, 2) hit by a drumstick by the drummer (who was drumming on TOP of the crowd while they held up his kit) and 3) got trampled as i was leaving by the crowd as the show spilt out into the street (red river). these guys were out of control. the last thing i saw before i took off was the singer scaling an apartment building across from the venue and jumping off into the crowd below.
* le castle vania – this dude can’t be more than 15 but he throws down some of the best breaks i’ve ever heard.
port o’brien – i caught them play the song I Woke Up Today three times because i’m just addicted to it. when i saw them on the top floor of buffalo billiards they handed pots and pans out to everyone in the crowd to play along and i swear i thought the floor would cave in from people jumping up and down and going apesh!t. so awesome.
BUT THE BEST MOMENT OF ALL WAS:
* jarvis cocker (from Pulp) – he lead one of the panels and played an accoustic version of Babies which was my favorite song when i moved to austin in 1996. i was just obsessed with Pulp back then and it was so surreal to see jarvis there playing that song for us. i had one of those smiles on that was so wide it hurt. oh man that made me so happy.
now i’m just looking forward to getting home to be with amy. i get back there on thursday morning.
nothing fancy but i put some public domain clips together to make a video for Fall From Grace:
This building is planned to be built over where the Shunt Vaults currently lies. By the time this thing is erected, it will be the largest building in London (by far) and the Shunt Vaults will have closed, so it seems a fitting tombstone for what has to be one of the greatest art spaces anywhere ever. It will be weird to look at it on the skyline one day and think ‘we used to dance there.’
The Shard, London from Uniform on Vimeo
i wish i had links to all this stuff but i don’t have time to look them up. i came across all of this stuff on http://www.last.fm (which i highly recommend if you’re not already on it or already consumed with pandora (pandora is great but i had to give it up when we moved since it doesn’t stream to the uk and all the vpn’s in the u.s. i go through are too slow to stream audio or video very well…plus i think last.fm has a much more sustainable model than pandora)) and have listened to these for several weeks now (long enough to vouch for them and to say with certainty that they’ve influenced the work i’m doing):
terrestre – tepache jam
chris clark – wolf
gorecki – lamb
the irrepressibles – in this shirt
pati yang – 1986
evil nine – restless
lou rhodes – save me
kettel – and unrequired as well
tom vek – that can be arranged
roisin murphy – tell everybody
depth affect – modellbilder
edit – asktray
m83 – kelly
nas – rule
prhizzm – empty your mind
lymbyc systym – birds
son of the electric ghost – world of confusion (this dude is from bastrop!)
badly drawn boy – promises
there were three moments in my life that nudged me into photography. this post is about the first.
u2’s achtung baby (still one of the greatest albums ever) changed my life in 1991. it was the brilliant combination of radical: songwriting, production, management and photography. this post is about the last.
in 1991 albums were still about more than music, it was an experience, and an important part of the experience for anyone that listened to u2 or depeche mode was anton corbijn because he created the look and feel of that experience. 1991 was the year i fell in love with music on my own (my mom was in love with music so until 1991 i shared interest in whatever she was listening to) and i fell in love with photography solely because of the incredible photos i stared at in the achtung baby cd insert. 1991 was the year i got my first guitar and wrote my first song. it’d be a few more years before i took my first photos. it’d be even later that i’d learn that my dad had been a songwriter and photographer as well when he was my age.
i was thinking about it tonight because i FINALLY got around to watching Control, the movie about joy division that was directed by anton corbijn. the camera work is good (of course) and the casting is perfect (samantha morton is incredible) but somehow the movie didn’t tell me or move me as much as the far better ‘24 Party People’ did (which i just watched a few days ago and LOVED), despite joy division only playing a small role in the latter movie. i think part of it is that anton shot the movie black and white, which is often his style, but it’s such a distortion from the real england that it makes what was actually a true story somehow less believable. i guess i expected that a master of imagery, as corbijn is, would find the way to tell the story of how alt-gloom bands like joy division (or the cure, or depeche mode or the smiths, etc) rose from what seems to me to be a relatively colorful england. the movie ‘this is england’ (one of my favorites) does a much better job of showing and reconciling the dark side of england with its colorful environment. i guess it’s an important reminder for myself (and anyone else that considers themselves a photographer): having your own style is fine but if your business is storytelling then don’t let your style get in the way of the story.
the following are photos from the brilliant anton corbijn http://www.corbijn.co.uk/
my favs are the depeche mode ones because i appreciate the subtle but consistent theme of putting dave gahan (the frontman) up front but martin gore (the one who writes depeche mode’s music) in focus:
i stumbled on this short film last night
projected onto a wall
in a dark and empty room
off a long tunnel
beneath London Bridge Station.
i can’t tell you how moved i was.
the combination of that setting with the haunting imagery and the breathtaking music gives me chills again just thinking about it.
amy and i got engaged over the weekend in paris. we had a great trip and we couldn’t be happier. the website below has the related story, photos, video, etc.
http://www.oneflameinthefire.com/ryanandamy
this is my favorite part:
http://www.oneflameinthefire.com/ryanandamy/video
