To add something special, each day in February 2010 there was a blog from selected members that explored a different aspect of where sound, music and creativity meet. The end result was a series of discourse by various different artists who use and/or appreciate sound & audio in different ways.

The organiser of the series, Emlyn Firth, compiled a daily list linking to each blog so that you could catch up on what they may have missed. To say thank you again to everyone to participated, and to give anyone who missed it a chance to comment and discuss, we thought we’d give it another spin.

And so we give you, Mix-Blog [Intro]. Enjoy.

You can also see each Mix-Blog listed here.

Got a blog about sound/audio/music that you want to tell us about? Feel Free to add a note & link in the comments below.

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Like a classic film or piece of art, one viewing just isn’t enough. Encore is about revisiting much loved creative blogs that are definitely worth a second look.

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Want to see more special events we’ve had in the past? Browse through our Partner Projects.

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I do not know what to write. I am sitting here staring at the screen, running sentences in my head, and turning my music on and off. Earlier I went foraging for food (in hopes of sparking some magical words), but ended up getting distracted by Arrested Development for 20 minutes. This happens just about every time I sit down to do anything. I’ll probably go play the guitar between this paragraph and the next.

Of course this is a familiar situation. Often referred to as “writer’s block”, the concept of an inspiration rut is unfortunately very familiar to every creative in any field. Sometimes ideas just don’t show up to work. Given this, we all develop strategies to combat such a scenario. Not all are foolproof, but it’s safe to say that most creative people have some battle plan for dealing with the dreaded “blank page”.

Knowing this I decided to ask some of today’s most exciting artists and creators what they do when the ideas aren’t flowing. I left the question fairly open ended and asked, What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut? As expected, I was presented with an array of strategies, ranging from listening to Boards of Canada in a forest alone, to cooking up a storm (recipe provided) and waiting for the mind to clear.

What follows are 25 strategies from these creatives to spark your inspiration; hopefully you’ll find something helpful in there…

Read full article here

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Why not share in the comments below how you overcome your creative block.

“It’s strange reading something your younger self wrote. I agree with most of the things I said here 2 years ago; but I think it’s also worth adding that things have changed in that time too. Namely tuition fees; they’ve almost tripled (I touched on it in my last point) and it’s now a huge financial decision on whether it’s worth actually going to University. I would say that it still probably is; purely because you learn much more than what your course can teach you, as my original post describes. And to be honest, £21k of debt or £35k of debt makes no real difference. They’re both huge and somewhat unreal sums; I doubt I’ll ever pay mine back. It doesn’t really worry me. I think that also, my insatiable optimism (and possible naivety) showed through back then; I soon discovered that after graduation is a bit like a wilderness; things don’t happen straight away, there’s a definite period of floating around. I graduated in the midst of the recession in 2009, had to move straight back to my parents house, away from all my friends, and got a job in a shop. It was miserable and soul-destroying. But – 9 months later I had landed a graduate job in London and I was fine. You just have to stay true to yourself, keep your goals in mind, but also be willing to let them shift too. When I graduated, I wanted to be a freelance illustrator. Now I’m a full time graphic designer, part-time freelance illustrator. It can be difficult, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Here are some of Rachel’s thoughts from 2009. You can read the full text here.

Things I Have Learned in My (University) Life So Far

1. When deadlines approach, things will go wrong.
This is the law of being an art student, I think. And it’ll be the little things that go wrong, the tiny disasters that don’t ruin everything, but make completing projects about 100x more complicated. Like, your printer running out of ink the night before. Every Mac in the building freezing and not liking you. Photoshop crashes 8 times in a row. Somebody sits in your studio space. The University internet goes down. You lose your ID card and can’t even get in the building. You somehow mess up the simple task of chopping mount board in a straight line. You stub your toe and there’s so much blood. Or you scalpel your finger and there’s so much blood. You get the idea. What do I do to make sure I avoid these things before hand-in? Nothing. You can’t. Just accept your fate, cry a bit, don’t get blood on your badly cut mount board, and get the job done.

2. I am very lucky. I know exactly what job I want.
The thing that I forget, and shouldn’t take for granted at all, is that to know what you want to do when you leave University is actually very rare, from my experience. I take it as a given; I want to be an illustrator. I’m sure most of the art building knows what they want to do – most of the ceramics kids want to be ceramicists, in some form, half the grapho designers want to be…well, graphic designers, or web designers, the textiles students, I’m sure a lot of them want to start their own accessories label. It’s kind of like, yeah, duh, I’m an Illustrator, I Illustrate. But most of my friends aren’t art kids. A lot of them do History, War Studies, Philosophy, “real” degrees, and most of them have no clue what job they’re going to end up in. (Although in these times of recession, who does, eh.) And that must be quite scary, actually. We’re lucky – we might be scared about our chosen career and where it’s going to take us, but hey – we HAVE a chosen career.

3. University fundamentally changes you as a person.
90% of the time, I’m pretty sure it’s for the best. Well, I’ve changed for the best, I hope. The thing about this is you can never really tell, unless people tell you. And people have told me. But this is cool. Also, it’s kind of natural – you arrive 18 or 19, and you leave 21 or 22…. those years of your life are always a bit turbulent, without the added intensity of the Uni experience. Because intense is what it is. And awesome. I’m going to miss it so very much.

4. These 3 years have been the best and worst of my life.
In relation to number 3, I think this probably applies to quite a lot of people. University is NOT uneventful. In no order at all, I’ve met some brilliant people, actually developed complete independence (not a thing to be taken lightly), loved, lost, laughed, cried, been on sleeping tablets, been prescribed diazepam, been attacked, burgled twice, won an ipod, bought cheesecake at 3am, danced in a hot tub in Oceana, bikini and all, (cringe) run out of money completely and entirely, learned to cook properly, discovered I actually can stand/do like commercial r ‘n’ b (didn’t see that one coming….), went to NY and Barcelona, spent 5 months depressed and sober, fell in love with the wrong guy, and I’ve got more friends than I’ve ever had in the rest of my life put together.

5. Photoshop is a genius, miracle invention, but it won’t make a bad idea good.
It just won’t. I know nothing about software programming, but I’m pretty sure Photoshop is made by wizards and it’s a very, very clever piece of kit. But just ‘cos it has lens flare, doesn’t mean you have to use it. You get out of Photoshop what you put into it. If your original concept is a bit naff, and you just put Filters > Poster Edges, or my personal hated Plastic Wrap, it doesn’t make it suddenly a brilliant piece of design. Oh, filters. How I hate thee. I used to use Cutout a lot in my first year. ‘Cos it looks, ‘like, totally collage effect, omg’. But first year is the place to do these things. Filters should be banned from second year onwards. But what HAS saved me, is Blending Options. How did I not know the wonders until 6 months ago. Again, these can be used badly, but the good solid standard Multiply and Screen are saviours. I’ve even been known to throw in some Colour Burn, I know, rebel. I used to sit there painstakingly cutting out all the white from pencil drawings. Multiply does that. In one second. When a classmate showed me that I literally nearly cried. Oh and holding down Alt when you drag a layer to duplicate it. I used to do Layer > Duplicate…. bla bla bla. These are things I learned in horror and now can’t live without.

Read more

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On Sunday my good friend Nicole and I attempted to to play at market stall sellers at The Backyard Market, off Brick Lane. It really is harder than you may think. In my very limited experience it’s easier to shift a used toilet brush and an odd sock at a bootsale than it is to sell a limited edition hand-pulled 4-colour print at the bargain price of £35 at a ‘trendy’ east-end market. As the day went on the phrase ‘If praise were pounds’ became more and more poignant. Lots of ladies loved Nicole’s teacup candles they cooed and ooohed at them but a great deal of persuasion was needed to make the sale, likewise with my prints, lots and lots of long conversations but sadly not as many sales. Still, it was an enjoyable experience, the highlight of the day was being talent-spotted by a Korean magazine, the incident kindly captured by Nicole. All in all we concluded that we won’t be making a career out of market trading, market sellers we salute you.

Other than the Sokolsky’s, we are show­ing prints by Lil­lian Bass­man, whose work has become one of my favorites, Albert Wat­son, FC Gundlach’s Ori­en­tal series, vin­tage Nor­man Parkin­son, some wild William Klein, Elliott Erwitt, three brood­ing Sarah Moon’s,  some early color works by Erwin Blu­men­feld, who was of course much more than only a fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher, and Frank Hor­vat, with a crazy-funny web­site of his own, called Hor­vat­land, which is truly worth a visit if you’ve never been, if only to dis­cover what wicked things he made besides the images he is mostly known for.

When some­one would have told me three years ago at the end of my self-inflicted fash­ion episode, that there would come a time when I would spend months — not weeks — work­ing on the same sub­ject, I seri­ously don’t know how incred­u­lous I would have looked. How­ever, I guess it is like one of the most impor­tant things his­tory class has ever taught me about  the Thirty Year’s War: you can always find a fas­ci­nat­ing angle to a sub­ject that does not appeal to you at first sight. I real­ize that every­one is dying to know what fas­ci­nat­ing angle mrs. deane has dis­cov­ered about fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, but it is way too late for bed­time sto­ries of any kind, so that will have to wait for another day.

An angle of inter­est we added with an eye on the local pub­lic in the Dubai region, is the story of Parveen Shaath, a Saudi fash­ion­ista avant la let­tre, who spent her life between fash­ion houses and her Arab clien­tele. Some pieces of her col­lec­tion, num­ber­ing more than 700 items, are on dis­play as well, along­side mate­r­ial from her per­sonal archive. As a friend of found footage, I could not but have imme­di­ate sym­pa­thy for the clumsy black and white snap­shots, stat­ing so obvi­ously what we all know: most peo­ple don’t ‘strike a pose’, how­ever fash­ion­able or expen­sive their clothes, they just wear them when eat­ing a late night ice cream, sit­ting on the edge of a foun­tain. Because there is no escape from the ordi­nar­i­ness of life, one of the most tena­cious things in this world.

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Originally published in September 2010 in Mrs. Deane, a blog run by Beierle + Kei­jser, visual artists from Ger­many and Hol­land.

A Photoautomat booth in Berlin, photographed by Lizz Lunney

I have always been fascinated with analogue photo booths. I have vivid memories as a child – the excitement and anticipation, pulling ridiculous faces, never really knowing what you’ll get until the old machines clunk and churn out your photographs. So, on a recent trip to Berlin, I was desperate to get back involved, like so many others, with the analogue phenomenon.

A short while after my return, I discovered that the Photoautomat project that exists in Berlin had transferred to London – one of those brightly coloured, glorious booths had been on my own doorstep and I didn’t even realise. A bit of internet research, a blog and a Twitter account later, I met Alex – Photoautomat’s London representative. He’s on a mission to bring back the beauty and art of the old-fashioned photo booth. Me, Amelia and fashion writers Sally and Jemma paid Alex a visit on a crisp Saturday morning to get involved, and have a chat with the man himself…

We have a chat with Alex Kokott – London’s representative of the Photoautomat analogue photobooth project – about his mission to bring the glory of analogue to the UK.

Image courtesy of the photoautomat blog.

How did the Photoautomat project start, and where did the booths come from?

Well, it really started about 5 years ago in Germany, where my friends bought one of the booths because they were fascinated with the old analogue machines and the photos they produce. Soon it took over Berlin and the rest of the country. I got interested in the booth when I was over visiting and followed my friends around to look after the booths. We all have our memories from when we were young and fooling around in those booths at the Mall, but seeing them again in Berlin really ignited my passion for them again.

What do you know about the history of the booths?
The photo booth was invented 1925 by a Russian immigrant in New York. He opened his Photomaton Studio on Broadway. For just 25 cents, everybody could get their photograph taken. That was quite a revolution back then as photography was just for the rich and famous; because of the booths, it became accessible to everybody. From then on they were used as props in movies such as Band Wagon with Fred Astaire, by artists like Andy Warhol and people from all backgrounds for fun or memories and obviously passport photos.

Where are the booths located now?
Our booths are all over Germany. Most of them are in Berlin, but also in Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne. We launched a booth a while ago in Vienna. Then there is my booth here in London. There are also booths in Paris and Italy.

How did this one end up in Cargo?
I thought it would be much easier to get a good location for a photo booth in London, but it turned out to be more difficult than I thought – policies and regulations mean a seemingly straightforward thing as installing a photo booth quite a task. I approached Cargo and they gave me the space in their beer garden straight away; they just liked the idea and it was done.

Why do you think the booths are so popular?
Well, people always like old things: vintage, analogue. The rebirth of Polaroid showed there is still a demand for analogue photography.There is something precious about a photo booth strip. It’s one moment, one photo and it can’t be replicated. No negative, no back up, just like real life. The photos also have a better quality than digital ones. There are apps out there on smart-phones to imitate the effect and I understand that most people don’t want to go through the hassle of having a analogue camera. This is where the photo booths come in. For a few quid, you can take your photo booth strip with your friends and keep that moment forever.

Image courtesy of the photoautomat blog.

How do you think the qualities of these booths compare to the modern booths we see in train stations/etc?
I guess I answered that question above, but there really is no comparison. The digital ones lack quality and depth and the spontaneity you have in the analogue booth.

Has the booth been used for anything other than people taking pictures with their mates?
I had a photo shoot last year with Mixmag in the booth. It was a fashion special with hats. There were also a few artists who used the booth for their projects. Fionna Banner used the booth for her work twice.

What does the Photoautomat project hope to achieve, long term?
Hopefully we’re here for years to come and give people from all backgrounds the opportunity to have their little moment. It’s really all up to the people who use our booths and what they make of it. That is the beauty about it – and always will be.

See more pictures from the booths on the Photoautomat Facebook and Flickr pages.

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