Illusive Mind

One of the beautiul things about Creative Commons and online collaboration in general is how some piece of a jigsaw you tried your hand at creating can be taken remixed, reused and re-contextualised into some other piece, complete and inspiring in its own right.

Milieu is an old song of mine from 2005. Octavian was browsing through some of my songs at MakeTunes and happened upon it. He sampled it, looped it and proceeded to create the truly haunting song: Laughing Shadows.

Be sure to check out more of his tracks on his MySpace pages Assfault14 & Sumerian7. There are chilling soundscapes with detailed and ponderous emotions as well as raging vehement metal with some serious guitar shredding. Don’t miss Nuclear Tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to future collaborations with Octavian, I think it is safe to expect great things.

Other Links

Octavian - Laughing Shadows@MakeTunes
Octavian’s songs@MakeTunes

www.myspace.com/assfault14
www.myspace.com/sumerian7

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In one sense art is a selfish endeavour. I’ve spent hours alone at night honing my craft on some piece. Be it finding the right chord progression, the right pixels or the right word. I rarely conceive of having an ‘audience’ it is an activity for its own sake , for self gratification.

Secretly you dream of being recognized, having that album pressed, that photograph printed, the novel published. Until such time, you pour yourself into this activity and send it freely into the digital ether hoping it bumps into someone and each time it does your heart swells with hope. All that we search for is a little recognition! If it were not for the feedback I get on my music at MakeTunes, my heart may have been broken by the vast silence and self-doubt some time ago.

So it was with delight that I recently discovered a blog dedicated to Black & White photography (www.ablogwithblackandwhitepics.com) had featured a portrait of mine, Serious. I discovered Bless’s work after she left a comment on the Random Ambient Collaboration, which itself is someone else’s project that I’m helping to promote.

I was immediately struck by the delicacy of the details in her sketches. The human face is inherently interesting. The software loaded into our brains to map out the nearly inscrutable and subtle details of faces in order to distinguish them from one another is immense. Then to my utter surprise I received a comment informing me that Bless has created a sketch based on my serious photograph:

A Psycho Speed One

Please check it out, as well as her other works.

To receive some recognition or even praise is heartening, but to be a source of inspiration is very flattering and it made my day.

A simple truth that is so easily overlooked by people who are self-consumed, or consumed by the problems of their ’self’ is the power each of us holds within ourselves. The power to brighten a person’s very spirit with a few kind words, a well placed smile, a comment on a blog somewhere wishing a struggling artist some encouragement. The digital ether of the internet can be a vast and lonesome landscape and yet people from different sides of the earth can bump into one another like primeval atoms and then, magic happens.

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http://www.myspace.com/mimiandteft

Mimi and Teft are a dance/house duo who know how to pump out some sexy pop melodic tunes. Tracks like Fairy Tale (What I’m Saying) sound like they were born for a club dance floor with perfectly delivered vocal hooks and a nice combination of ‘naked’ synths. Have a listen and see if it doesn’t stick in your head. There are also tracks like Chocolate off their debut EP ‘Look Into The Mirror‘ which are more laid back and contemplative but retain the upbeat synth melodies whilst bringing out the soulful quality of Mimi’s vocals which are perhaps best displayed in North Star.

On their website, M&T write about their technique of writing and mixing a song in one hour. To my ears this results in great clean mix that isn’t over-produced. You can see a video of how they pull it off here. Not every track is a hit however, Wachu Wanna falls a little flat for me but that may well be because it sits on the more mainstream pop section of the music spectrum. But then you have songs like You Addicted Me which manages to bring a trance sensibility to a house track, a great combination.

Teft (Christopher Teft Hughes) also has some killer photography you should check out on his site or on flickr. I wonder how many music producers are also into photography? Haha, it’s down to the hard wiring of the ‘artistic’ brain I’m sure.

After reading how Teft puts it all together I’m impressed at the sounds he’s gotten out of Vanguard, I’ll have to try my own hand at it. I don’t think I could pull off a song in an hour, but with a vocalist like Mimi, the hooks write themselves.

Look out for these two, you are going to be hearing more from them in the future I’m sure.

http://www.mimiandteft.com/
http://teft.mimiandteft.com/
http://www.myspace.com/mimiandteft  
http://www.purevolume.com/mimiteft

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I’ve been a big fan of George Monbiot’s writing since reading his column for The Guardian newspaper and especially after reading his insightful book, The Age of Consent. I was reluctant about going to the trouble of buying and reading his latest book about climate change ‘Heat‘.

I didn’t need to be convinced that climate change was real, we were causing it and we had to act quickly and decisively to prevent a runaway global catastrophe. So what use was reading the dry detailed policy outlines going to be? I put my faith in Monbiot’s ability to surprise and shock my preconceptions and I was not disappointed.

The power of Monbiot’s book is that he cuts through so much of the obfuscation and hedging you hear in the political debate so that you get an unfiltered view of the scientific reality of climate change. Unless you flatly refuse to believe in climate change you cannot come away from reading this book without agreeing that climate change is the great moral crisis of our time.

What makes grassroots action so obviously important is that this is a fight against gluttonous consumption and therefore the interest of the uber-wealthy. Money can and is always found in the trillions to be invested in ways of destroying, people, cities and countries, war is a most profitable enterprise. But investing money in renewable energy while there is still ‘black stuff’ in the ground is incomprehensible to big business. And restraint is incomprehensible to the consumers of a first world economy that is based on greed and living beyond one’s means.

Heat is a must read for people who want to size up the promises from their leaders on climate change action and an effective way to galvanize personal responsibility and action. We cannot sit around waiting for an answer whilst we slouch towards calamity.

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Check out the October 24, 2007 edition of Carnival of Australia.

This edition begins with a recognition of October as sexual violence awareness month and this week as Crime Prevention week. Even our Prime Minister agrees, Australia says NO!

Imaginif Child Protection became Serious Business is supportive of ending violence against all people, especially children and we therefore begin this edition of the Carnival of Australia with posts that recognise safety and acknowledge abuse and child protection.

Look out for upcoming carnivals to post your own blog posts.

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