Manifesto

Put this date in your diary peeps. The Paper Cinema (with live music from me and Quinta - www.myspace.com/iquinta) are playing at Manifesto (The Nave, 1 St Paul's Road, N1) on the 17th July. If you're in London, do come along as it really should be a cool event.

EP DVD

OK. I've made a decision. Anyone who's spent any time in my company, knows this to be quite a rarity. I'm that annoying person who can't make up their mind about ANYTHING.

Anyway, after YEARS of procrastination and hiding and excuses and learning and not knowing where I'm heading etc etc etc, I am finally going to make a finished product!

I have made the decision to make an EP, but release it as a DVD, so it will include:
a number of tracks (to be decided)
A video for each track
Perhaps a few extra little videos
possibly.... a max/msp stand-alone application
OTHER STUFF
The idea of doing it as a DVD is to try and find a way to link the silly and random videos I've been making with the silly and random music I've been making. The finished product I will aim to sell is going to be, let's face it, a bit weird. But I really want to make a go of this project, and experiment with the way I approach making music/videos/art/whatever it is. I've started planning deadlines, allotting times for different processes, brainstorming, and generally trying to break this project down into manageable chunks (basically trying to remember everything that Andy Hunt taught me at York!).

One of the questions that I need to work out, and I would be very interested to hear people's opinions on, is:

"How much content do I give out (put on the internet for free) during this process?"

Do I keep it all hidden until I release it?
Do I make stuff available as I create it?
Do I try and stick extra stuff online aside the project?
Do I give teasers?
Do I document the process?

I would be very interested, and grateful, if anyone had any advice/opinions/thoughts about this aspect of creating stuff in 2010. I personally feel that the way that both industry and culture have changed in the last few years is a tremendous opportunity to reconsider how we approach music/art/performance/whatever. Things have changed. Music is ubiquitous. And it is free.

I see this as a great opportunity to rethink what I can offer as a musician.

I'm tired now, but going to bed with a sense of purpose, with ideas bubbling up, and a determination to harness and manage these ideas, and actually bloody finish something!

Ed

SANDWICH

Myself and Robin Foster have sporadically recorded music together over the past few years (calling ourselves SANDWICH), but we have recently started an experiment that Robin devised quite a while ago, and that we have finally started putting into practice. Essentially, it is improvisation that is carried out asynchronously, whereby one or other of us (we are alternating roles at the moment) will send the other a piece of music. The recipient of the music then decides on an instrument/technique/max patch/whatever to use, and without listening to it first, simply presses record, and improvises along. It is early days, but it's a really interesting idea, and I'm quite pleased with the results so far.

Here are a couple of examples:

LANDELOTTIE by SANDWICH by robinfoster

Moon woman by SANDWICH by robinfoster


Do Check out the rest of Robin's stuff on his Soundcloud site:

http://soundcloud.com/robinfoster

as well as his personal site:

http://www.robinfoster.net

Give me Coffee or Tea

Check out this website, cos it's well sick innit:


www.bringmecoffeeortea.com/

Really interesting stuff - FOLLOW THEM

It includes a video I did for their Krautrock section.

The Krautrock Party by Ed Dowie from Paul Hanford on Vimeo.

My Latest IMM Session

For those interested in hearing the results of my latest IMM session, I have put all 9 tracks on Soundcloud:

http://soundcloud.com/eddowie/sets/imm-session-5

These tracks were entirely composed, recorded and mixed during a 12 hour period on the 16th February 2010. Consequently, they are a little rough, but I hope you enjoy.

Me 'n' Fred Dineage

Just thought I'd post this up as it just got mentioned on the Collins & Herring show on BBC 6Music! I'm big fan of their podcast (The Collings and Herrin Podcast), and so i am a happy nerd. This picture was taken at Reading Festival in about 1998 or so and is probably my prize possession (it's not).

Immersion Music Method

A few years ago, a friend of mine lent me a book with an uninteresting, if not annoying title: Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook: A Radical Guide to Cutting Loose, Overcoming Blocks, and Writing the Best Songs of Your Life It is actually a really good book to read if, like me, procrastination and self-doubt are your biggest problems (and you're able to ignore some of the more, shall we say 'Californian' elements to the book.

In essence it describes an approach to making music that involves setting aside a 12 hour period, during which you try to write and record 20 pieces of music! It does not matter if you reach this amount, but you must aim to produce as many as you can. Although the book is aimed at 'songwriters', the theory can be used for any type of music (I dare say, it would stretch to anything creative), and is a kind of sledgehammer approach to breaking creative block.

The reason for describing this book is that I did one of these IMM (Immersion Music Method - I know! Wanky title) sessions yesterday. I managed to write 9 pieces (which is about usual for me). I feel that this approach is such an excellent way of getting ideas. You have to almost switch off the analytical side of your brain, and just record stuff, but as a result you try things that perhaps under normal circumstances, would not arise. It is also important to forget any notion of whether what you're doing is any good (at least for those 12 hours): an action which counter-intuitively often means you produce good work. It is such an emotional journey that you experience during those 12 hours, and at the end of it, you have a large number of pieces to work with.

So far, I have only done this IMM thing about once a year, but I really want to find a way of upping the ante for myself, in a way that will not set me up to fall (it is all very well to say that I will do 1 a week, or whatever, but how do I stick to it?). I also want to decide a method of putting these things online (do I make a video for each one? Do I set aside a different 12 hours in which I must record these videos? Do I just put them on Myspace? etc.).

In theory, I am thinking that I will try to do an IMM about once a fortnight-ish, and have provisionally pencilled in dates in my calendar, but I guess writing this, and in theory having it read by anything up to 2 people, is an opportunity to make it more official in my head.

If you have any thoughts about this, or suggestions, or...anything to do with creative block, that'd be really cool. I really didn't plan to write on this blog (as I am not a writer), but... hey ho. I will endeavour to put some stuff up here from these sessions, but they obviously have a certain quality to them, as they are created in such a short space of time, so I need to present them in such a way that this is taken into consideration.

Anyway.... To Be Continued...

Ed

What have I got to write about?

I don't know.

Who would want to read it?

I don't know.

Why am I doing it then?

I don't know.

A good a place as any to start I guess. By not knowing. A repository for my own self-obsession I guess. Might as well post a piece of music:

new

This is a blog.

W.

6.

Boombüm