A surprise of an evening February 27, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment,Music,Review , add a commentThe stars finally aligned to allow me and one of my bestest buds to go into town on Tuesday in order to peruse some live music. Our intention was to go to an open mic night, but when we got there we found no such open mic, or indeed even an open venue. So we instead we headed the independent (and secretly Christian) Bar and Coffee house the Malt Cross, which we’ve been scoping out with timid curiosity for a while. The place is alarmingly hip and feels so oozing with indie cred that it’s a little scary for those of us new to that amount of music cool. It’s also a very interesting building and I’d urge anyone living around Nottingham to go inside and take a look for that reason alone.
Anyhow, as it happened Tuesdays are a night for free music (or at least this one was) and for young people with old, broken cars and pay cheques not coming till the end of the week this was rather perfect. We were there rather early for the music so we got to see the band sound checking. Not the best time to see a band but without this my curiosity would not have been piqued. It was a band not only with quite a large number of musicians but a quite ludicrously large number of instruments to go with it. Ukeleles, mandolins and trumpets combined with more traditional bass, guitar and drums. Plus they had a dedicated chellist. This was something I had to see.
It took us all the way till the very end of the evening to find out what the band were called, but I’m just gonna name them now for ease of writing and to allow me to speak about the EP that we bought (yeah, I have a 60% share in it). As it turns out they are called Hhymn, a name with all the indications of being appropriately indie without being too pretentious. They hail from Nottingham, which is nice purely because I like to find local bands that aren’t playing the derivative drivel of most of the ones I’ve seen.
I didn’t exactly fall in love with them from the live show, but I definitely enjoyed it. And it interested me enough to want some of their music. All live music is improved by knowing the songs though, repetition is such a core concept in music, there is only so much that I can enjoy something when hearing it for the first time. I have to be able to go and listen to it in my own space, in my own world. Luckily the EP captures the best elements of the band that I saw from the live setting as well as bringing in some minimalist production that just enhanced things that little bit. As such it has become a CD (figuratively speaking, all my listening is from my PC) that is really growing on me.
The songs are well put together, full of neat rhythms and piercing melody with a pleasant but yearning backing put out by soft clean and acoustic instrumentation. The structures and concepts aren’t ground breaking, they’re just very well done, and the sheer variety of instruments gives the necessary variety to make each track unique but still cohesive to the sound of the EP and the songs themselves. These guys have got a sound that I think has potential to appeal to a great number of people and I’m really looking forward to seeing more of them, I hope that they continue to write and play, as long as they do I’ll be followingand listening.
Repetition
The future of Dyson? February 11, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Internets,Scraps , add a comment
This was made by my friend and made me chuckle, I thought it should be out there for the world to see so he let me put it up here. For those who don’t know that’s James Dyson, inventor of a fine handful of neat things, probably the most awesomest being the Dyson Airblade. If you’ve never had the good fortune to use one you’re missing out, they are bad ass.
The trouble with radio February 8, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Essay,Music,Rants,Society , add a commentI’ve avoided music radio for a long time. From when I was young I knew how important music was to me but I found it nearly impossible to find stuff that I liked and listening to the radio never helped. I did for quite a while, as you do when you don’t own any music or have any other channels to hear it. It left me entirely disatisfied and I stewed in some kind of musical no mans land for a long time.
Recently however, I’ve found myself listening to rather a lot of radio (for me, anyway), not through choice but because it’s on where I work. Now, it’s not local or national radio like you’d typically listen to, but actually it’s very similar in style, it just has adverts for products from the store rather than from other companies.
Listening to it more and more has really brought me to realise just why DJs let down their audience time and time again. Indeed, it’s such a deep betrayal that no one even knows it’s happening. Every day I find myself hearing the same songs. The same bland, un-musical pieces of factory made pop music.
I’m not about to suggest that DJs not play chart music, as much as I would like that. No, instead all I ask is that DJs do what I percieve their job to be. Not everyone has time to seek out music, to dig and listen and cast away and listen and love and seek and find and pour themselves into. It’s their job to not just play what people already know they like, but to play them stuff that they may find they like. To open new doors, to new and interesting places. To introduce people to worlds they never thought existed.
Music has incredible power. You ask almost anyone and they’re likely to say they like music. As a species, we are built to enjoy music. But some of us more than like music. Taking my average tracks per day (from my pretty damn accurate last.fm profile) and the median (since the mean would take a ridiculous amount of time to find) length of songs in my music library we can calculate that on average I spend 4.725 hours a day listening to music. Ish. Of course, that’s not exclusive (and doesn’t include when I’m at work, or when someone else is playing the music). Doesn’t sound like the hugest portion, but bare in mind that’s over 4 years that average, and includes times when I’ve been working or at school full time. It’s been slowly rising over the past year as well.
Now I’m sure there are plenty of people more obsessed with music than I am but I’m pretty deep in at this point. Most of me is focused around it. And it’s damn important to me. Because of the effect it’s had on me, I want to share that effect. I want others to feel it and to know it. That’s why it annoys me so much that DJs are always playing the same songs, they never give your average every day music liker to become a full blown music lover because they limit them to the top 40, or even smaller groups of songs.
I think that’s fundamentally wrong, and something of a moral injustice. There’s a further element that I’ve become more and more receptive to further reaches of music and I want to have another source to say “Hey, listen to this, see what you think”. I want to be able to trust that DJs are playing music because they think it’s interesting and good, not because it’s what’s been handed to them by their major record label funded bosses, not because it’s what we’re being told to like.
I do have a big problem with pop music, I hate about 99% of it. Mainly because it’s pretty much all the same. Doesn’t matter what genre it claims to be. If you think of all music as coming from a centre and spreading out in different directions all around as different genres then what’s played on the radio accounts for the tiniest spec in the middle. Yes, some of those bits are on the bit that starts to be come Electronic, or Blues, or Rock or Punk but ultimately it’s so close to the middle that it shares almost nothing in common with the further reaches of the genre.
And that’s my problem. A lack of variety. Currently all we get is a tiny spec of all the music out there and that’s not fair on anyone. Not fair on the listeners who never have the chance to discover music that could change the way they see the world. Not fair on the artists that work so hard to produce original and interesting and likable music that goes entirely ignored by the mainstream population. And more importantly, not fair on me for having to listen to all the shit they do play.
The Minestrone Mystery February 2, 2010
Posted by Sharny in : Ramble,Rants,Scraps,Thoughts , add a commentThere is a great mystery that currently confuses countless in this country. How many times have you reached for your variety pack of Cup-a-Soup (or generic brand Cup Soup) only to find unwanted packets of minestrone? Like a plague that haunts our cupboard, minestrone is rife among these variety packs and is almost guaranteed to sit for years at a time, fermenting and stagnating.
No one likes minestrone (Source: me and 4 of my friends). Or at the very least, everyone likes all the rest of the better. So why do they keep appearing? Surely there isn’t a big difference in cup soup production costs, I can’t imagine that chicken and vegetable, mushroom or tomato are more expensive to produce than minestrone.
I’m not asking for much here, just some variety packs that don’t include minestrone, cause I’ve got about 5 packets still left to get through, and they’ve been there for as long as I can remember. Many people are left enraged and frustrated by looking to a relaxing cup a soup after a long day at work and only finding minestrone. This plague upon our land must stop, for the sake of all our sanity.
