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.

The resulting collaboration will produce two short experimental films exploring themes of collective identity and historical perspective.

In this special event, the screening of the films will be accompanied by a panel presentation charting the projects evolution.

The screening will be followed by networking drinks.

Please note that this event is free but ticketed, the best way to book a space is through the Festival box office, either in person or over the phone on 0131 623 8030. Also note that these tickets cannot be booked online.

Join us at Inspace to meet, discuss and experience Roderick Buchanan & Fear Wasabi’s collaborative piece.

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If you are attending the festival during the day and have a delegate pass pop in and see us at our Hub situated at the Novotel, 80 Lauriston Place Edinburgh EH3 9DE. Have a cuppa, chat to the Censta team, upload, unwind or just say hello.

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To find out more about the project and get the latest news on the production of the films, read this blog or have a look at the Roderick Buchanan Soundtrack Group

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Image by Roderick Buchanan

Some thoughts on the ‘Roderick Buchanan Soundtrack’ / ‘Composer Wanted’ event at In-Space Edinburgh.

Sunday was a rollercoaster. Waves of anticipation, followed by dead calm, followed by a stamp on the arm by a digicult representative.

We did a lot of talking. Good therapy for all those feeling battered and bruised by the project. Paul Welsh was a sort of L. Ron Hubbard initiating the audience into the ways of Central Station. In-Space, the venue, described in the EFF brochure as an “Atmospheric theatre” – a type of auditoria built in 1920’s and 30’s to create a fantastical setting in which to watch a film – looked more like the reception hall for some cousin of the Wizard of Oz. I felt like Toto looking at that curtain off to the right of camera when I was meant to be awed in the presence of the Grand Wizard. In a sort of animal reaction to the architecture I growled my way through the evening feeling that the big wizard, that is new media, is really only a Corporate Arts representative who just wants to be feared.

We were closeted in Studio 2 at Savalas with Michael – and his faithful and incredibly patient hound Somhairle (reference Google for spelling, it’s Gaelic for ‘Sam’) –  for about 8 hours bashing out the final mixes for the two films. Michael is the third sort of engineer/producer type we’ve been lucky enough to have tolerate us at Savalas, and his skills confirmed our suspicions that an entry qualification for working there is ‘devastating ProTools speed’. If we asked him to do something to a mix, he had either already done it or was finished by the time we were done trying to vocalise it. Which was handy, as we used every last drop of time we had, trying out different things…I suspect our seemingly limitless indecision threatened to drive Gaia quite mad as she kept us on deadline…

At times throughout the whole process, we’ve discussed with Roddy and among ourselves the peculiar dynamic we’re working with here – we’ve never really soundtracked anything before, and Roddy hasn’t been that involved with soundtrack-ers. Hey, that’s why we’re all here, I guess… However, today in particular I really got the feeling we were all pulling together and speaking the same language – there was even a strange sort of excitement when we all realised we were obsessing over the same single note at the end of one of the films. We were literally leaping out of our seats over a single plucked violin note – it may seem a bit pedantic, but in a heart-warming way. A lot of the process thus far has involved us sending sound mixes and film edits back and forth, sort of like audio/visual tennis, so it was great to knuckle down both with the locked edits and for the first time properly really together, with ourselves and Roddy. Obviously we’ve met up and so forth before, but we’ve never done a huge amount of work while in the room together, more just showing off results and taking reactions from that – more tennis. We were able to be open and honest about what we were aiming for and doing, on a point-by-point (almost note-by-note) basis, and it really showed up the collaborative side of the project. Even where we had disagreements  - no, it wasn’t all plain sailing, which I guess rarely really happens when you get five or six creative people bouncing ideas off of each other – we knew it was because we all genuinely cared a lot about the project and wanted to make the best soundtrack possibly possible, and we came to conclusions we’re all happy with.

And that’s the sort of final word, the perfect cadence at the end of our little bonus-features composer commentary here…we got a bunch of creative people together, and created something that we all like. “This is making me happy”, as Roddy would say. I think I can speak for the entire Wasabi collective when I say it’s been a tremendous experience for all of us, both as a sort of learning-curve, a creative challenge, and in terms of just being great fun. You’ll notice I’ve not said that much about the actual details of the soundtracks or indeed the films themselves – so I guess you’ll just have to come along to the Edinburgh International Film Festival next Sunday and see them for yourself…!

Phil (Fear Wasabi)

There has been a rise in the amount of blogging by the other members of Fear Wasabi recently, which I’ve been glad of.  In the earlier phases of the project I worried that I was failing to properly represent them, being as we were submitting collectively and so on through my individual profile.  Writing in the 1st person can have an ego-trip effect on me, I bet this turns into a philosophical ramble of some sort…

Anyway, following our now-customary travel disaster, yesterday we were back at Savalas “plush is not the word” Studios, situated in a renovated section of the old Govan Town Hall, which we found still has it’s main hall area hidden away, in all it’s grandeur.  While part of the team played with recording the reverb in there (leaping around in the dark, frightening the janitors), the others got on with some recording and arranging in-studio.

Fear Wasabi has been referring to Giles as our “5th Horseman”.  At one point yesterday while he was out, we de-tuned a violin (a hammer would have been a more subtle method to how we achieved this) and bowed some double-stop harmonics, creating a frankly bizarre noise.  That kind of stunt would have swiftly lead to our expulsion from any orchestra in the land, but upon his return, Giles simply grinned and said “cool sound”.

Apart from being tremendously encouraging and understanding, Giles has been manning the mixing-desks for us, and until we met Iain he was the fastest man we’d ever seen at the controls of Pro-Tools.  There were one or two moments of revelation for us in there, first hearing our rough sketches played through the Dolby system in the studio, and then hearing the difference once Iain had a chance to do a quick (really quick) 5.1 mix and give the various sounds some space…completely different listening experience.  The skills these guys bring to the table totally transform whats being produced.

Yesterday afternoon also brought an always-welcome opportunity to talk with Roddy and Gaia about the ideas and sounds we have been toying with.  Different perspectives and opinions are, to my mind, essential in the creation of work that is interesting and satisfying not only to those making it, but objectively too.  I can’t help but feel privileged to have been able to work with such a group of diverse talent as this.

Enough talking about working, best go get on with some!

Andy (Fear Wasabi)

PS. Told you I’d ramble.

Roddy talked to us about the difficulties in the collaborative process, and elaborated upon his ongoing involvement with the project. We discussed with him our ideas that had been previously presented as sketchy, partial recordings. We played our most up-to-date composition for Lament, and heard Roddy’s comments. Gladly, he was honest about aspects that he thought were inappropriate, and thankfully, these were generally details of the composition which we agreed needed work.

Our initial priority was to record an important aspect of the Lament soundtrack – so the first thing we focused on was clapping. In a flamenco style rhythm, to speed up in time with each other… we did many takes, some approaching the desired effect. It felt good doing this; building a rhythm together. Some takes were just one or two of us, others were all four – with Giles faithfully manning the mixing desk.

Our mentor at the studio, Giles was with us throughout the day, lending us his professional expertise, giving us both advice and encouragement to follow our own ideas. In many ways we were all pretty clear, and agreed, on the approach we were taking to the two pieces; though with Lament there was some doubt over the structure of the composition. We spent time discussing this. There were objectives we felt unable to progress on until the final voice recording was made for this piece. We also realised that the newest cut of the Tattoo video, being significantly longer, would require us to re-record our soundtrack piece for it. Chatting to Giles about the facilities available, as well as the techniques we could use to sculpt or enhance our recordings, we were able to plan what we needed to do in time for the next session at Savalas, and used our last hour or so to record some improvised tangents. The session therefore concluded with a sense of achievement, and as we made our way back to Dundee we firmed our resolutions for the next stage in the plan.

The guys are beavering away as we speak – refining their ideas and trying some more stuff out with a view to spending the day on wednesday in our foley/recording studio to explore all our sound props, sfx library and record some old fashioned playing of musical instruments.  with a mix of video artist, sound artist and classically trained musicians, we are confident of something that will work with Roddy’s film.  Onwards

The Business End

The Fear Wasabi bandwagon rattled down from it’s HQ in Dundee to Glasgow yesterday for a very pleasant afternoon chatting with Gaia and Giles at Savalas.  The discussion occasionally touched on our “working dynamic”, which now needs to expand a bit given the deadlines and so on, as well as the need to work quite closely with Giles.  My effort at describing our working practise as Fear Wasabi (which, prior to this project was more a semi-improvised live-performance creature rather than a recording one) was that we had “several long discussions before sitting down to record over the space of an evening”, which probably wasn’t terribly enlightening.  I think it’d be fair to say that what we try to focus on is the root concept that we want to convey, and that how we go about making actual sounds follows that.  Sometimes specific ways of conveying an idea will come to us, but often we work just by trying things and seeing how the others react.  Each member of the group plays some sort of instrument, for example on our Traffic interpretation we really liked the video’s simple energy, so you can hear me strumming away at a violin, Gomango playing a harmonium and rattling some fruit-shakers, In/visigen bowing some violin through a guitar effects-pedal and Phipsim playing his beloved Korg x-50 and MicroKorg…all of us huddled around a small microphone.
Anyway, a few hundred words later I feel I’m no closer to really pinning down how exactly we make these noises, hopefully through the mysteries of the internet this will have made some sense to someone somewhere…
Upon it’s return to HQ, Fear Wasabi is pleased to report that it enjoyed some excellent fish and chips from The Silvery Tay (yes, in Newport rather than Dundee.  If ever a city was in real need of a good chipper, it’s Dundee) and sat on the roof of a castle watching the sun go down.

Congratulations to them, and all the best with the project!

I’m not sure how I feel about the whole thing. I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t put more work in. Bad timing, but that’s the sort of thing you need to push through. Listening back to my submissions, I’m mildly cringing at how rough and underdeveloped they are. I’m convinced everyone else’s were vastly superior!

It was fun to meet with Roddy and talk about his work. I’ll look forward to seeing the finished pieces, with the benefit of his impressive insight.

I think I’ll take 2 things from this experience:

Firstly:

My working preference used to very much be: talk-about-it-together, execute-it-apart. I think that’s changed somewhat over the last couple of years. As much as I enjoyed talking with Roddy, I failed to establish a connection with the project for myself. That’s maybe down to not meeting up with anyone else involved. The ability to maintain a distance-working relationship is obviously very important today but I don’t feel like I got into the spirit of that. Will need to look out for that next time, but I guess it’s also made me appreciate the intimate musical relationships I’m fortunate enough to have with people at the moment.

And secondly:

Blog, shmog.

Big Ta to Central Station, Roddy & Giles!

Comment by Gaia Meccuci [project producer]:

Very interesting points you raise Jonnie. The ever increasing distance-working relationship on collaborative projects is indeed very important these days but at the same time establishing a real, close connection with a project and the people behind it is still crucial for an artist to be able to use their talent and creativity in the most satisfying way.

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Let me just say that both your submissions were far from being rough and underdeveloped! They were in fact very interesting approaches and the idea of the unsynced flute loops seemed to reveal a new layer and something surprising with each listening. The decision was hard, all of you demonstrated very personal insights into the ideas behind each piece.

It would be great to keep having your input in the project as we go along, so I hope there is scope to reconsider your blog shmog stance!

I’ve been part of the creative momentum on ‘Composer Wanted’ for a while now and it seems to be birling on down the road quite nicely towards it’s June outcome, but I’m far far away and only contactable through the slightest Skype connection. So I was invited to keep contact going with all those interested in our process by typing up a creative blog.

I’m 9 hours ahead of the Glasgow office (it’s 09:00 on the 20th of May here) and they’re all currently tucked up in bed warmly anticipating timecodes and approved scripts in the morning – But theirs many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.

Weather is dictating my calendar. I’ve got to strike out today in a weather window that could close tonight. I’m currently on a photo assignment in Australia and need to take the opportunity when it’s here. It’s not like I can come back next week.

So, apologies to all the creative people waiting for my input and output, it’s pushed back by a day. I’ve got to take these photographs and for the first time in days, it’s not raining out there.

Yours Aye, RB