I moved to Hong Kong this year.
Here’s a page I keep about it, with videos, pictures and words.
Show Your Workings
This is the best, biggest thing I ever made.
Making up music, recording it and making videos to go with that music was the dream to me growing up.
Technology has made is possible for me to enjoy this process without having to fight.
This is a strange result, I guess, but it’s our result and we loved every minute of it.
The rest of our music can be found here.
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… with Ken Johnston
I was fortunate enough to take a few excellent afternoons of Ken Johnston’s time during the autumn and winter of 2011 investigating some of the songs I’ve known all my life.
This kind of thing really exists in its own time, but when we knew I was going to Hong Kong we thought we’d better tape it for posterity.
Ken is a man who *really* gets it. I miss him.
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Fraser/Wright – FA Swing
Jazz, it turns out, is hard to film when you’re also playing. I find this video very hard to watch without zoning out, because after about 30 seconds, you’re aware that you’re only getting 2 shots, yet repeating the whole thing to get more angles isn’t really feasible.
On the other hand, I think it’d have been worth a crack.
Anyway, James Fraser is a really good player, and I think this is a pretty nice rendition of FA Swing, so I think it’s worth keeping.
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The Bonds That Bind
The tremendous @ukuleleboy has been writing, arranging, recording and uploading a song every week. This is week 40. A lovely tune, great words, smashing arrangement and a really fun day making a video.
Check out his other songs here.
And No More Shall We Part
A Nick Cave book happened to be open on the piano from Saturday night. I wanted to film something with the 70-200 lens that @christiancable had kindly lent to me.
I usually try and get things live, so I thought I’d try a pre-recorded piano part and experiment a bit. Not sure what the Rubik’s cube is doing in there, but I think he looks great on video.
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Not Every Moment Rules
Someone asked why I didn’t put our music up on this site, and I had no good answer, so here’s a song.
I get bored of our songs pretty fast, but I hadn’t heard this for a year or so and there were lots of moments in it that we got excited about when we made them.
Not Every Moment Rules was named by Paul, who had heard the phrase on a director’s commentary for some film or other.
By the way, you can hear the rest of this album from here.
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Bill Orrick – Oblivious
As with all the best people, I first met the terribly handsome and talented Bill Orrick at a barbecue.
We drank lager out of aluminium canisters for a few hours whilst picking the edible bits out of some burned husks of cow.
It was at some point in this meat-addled haze that I first heard the song “Oblivious”. It is one of the very best songs anyone I know has ever made. He and Leona are so happy just to sing songs like it’s nothing. Just something you do along with eating and drinking. Normal.
Rad.
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When I Procrastinate…
This video was really just a learning process for me. There were a bunch of things I wanted to experiment with… split-screen, using only daylight (which doesn’t work), audio looping, extensive titling (which now makes me cringe).
This was mainly done in one take, just with some bits cut out of it. This means there’s no miming, which is what I wanted. Everything you see being played is actually being played (just possibly in a different loop from the past). Putting it together felt a bit like Primer.
The audio was recorded just in the room… so much is wrong with it, really… but I learned a lot.
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