previously on the Hunchblog....

while i've got slightly distracted posting up entertaining videos let's not forget the real reason we're here.

the real reason i have a blog.

it is an outlet for what i do.

whether that may be music, poetry, writing or photography.

and occasionaly pointing you in the direction of the things i think are quite cool and worthy of peoples attention.


so incase it had passed anybody by i thought i'd take this oppurtunity to re-up some of my latest musical efforts... which are also free for you to download if you fancied

Number 16 track one by Hunchbakk

Number 16 track two by Hunchbakk

these two make up part of a new project that has no fixed themes or ideals, but will hopefully grow naturally from disparate influences and half worked tracks from my hard drive

SoundArt8 by Hunchbakk

and i think most people should be aware of the SoundArt project by now, SoundArt8 i is the latest piece to be completed and the full write up can be found here


And i have some freedom til the end of the week to try and get creative, but sadly these things can't be forced so easily and i have already spent two nights clicking between afew remixes that i currently have on the go and making the smallest of advances on SoundArt9, only to find myself getting next to nowhere while the time just ticks away.

i must stop posting videos...

.... and start writing and posting real articles.

but i couldn't let this video go unnoticed!!

Iron Man?

on my blog?

two days in a row?

pah, i'm a DC fan, but it's a baby!! in a superhero costume!! how could i resist??!

if you thought a batman musical would suck.....

after a mildly creative burst i must admit that i haven't found as much time for writing recently as i would have hoped to.

having said that i have got an article over at glasswerk that i don't think i'd made you aware of yet, it's about my girlfriend being short, and i have completed a new article for the advertiser about Mike Skinner's influence over the musical landscape of 2010.

i had to cut it down drastically to fit it within the required word count so chances are i'll probably sling up the full length version on here or on glasswerk.

and since it all seems rather interchangeable the 'short' article will end up in the Enfield Advertiser, but it will not be accompanied by a picture of my girlfriend stood behind tall people at a gig like the editor suggested we try and arrange.

so what else could be an appropriate image for the article? we shall have to wait and see....


and for today?

i was considering posting up my favourite example of of daggering after yesterday's tutorial...

i also considered bitching about how my healthy computer seems to still actually be infected with some sort of google hating virus...

but the winner is this musical ditty form my old fave, I'm a Marvel, I'm a DC, which has reached 100 videos and celebrated with a hugely entertaining (for geeks at least) musical number on the state of Marvel and DCs movie franchises

happy centenary!!

in for the kill

sometimes even i have to face up to the real world, as much as it pains me, and things are getting very real for me, causing me to lose my marbles, mislay £200 of my own cash and write self-pitying poetry

but these things are temporary (tho possibly more frequent in the near future) but for now, things are good.

so lets get a little distracted then!

as of writing this i am currently listening to the new Major Lazer mixtape

NEW MAJOR LAZER MIXTAPE!!

yeah!! i know!

and it's a mash-up with La Roux and it is official and Mad Decent sanctioned and it is free!!




and perhaps if the mood takes me while listening to it i may attempt 'Daggering'

i've wanted to have a go at daggering since witnessing the Major Lazer party at Notting Hill Carnival last year but i've never realy known how to...

oh joy!! a bloody daggering instructional video by Lazer co-hort Skerritt Bwoy!

now nothing can hold me back!

diagnosis

i would kick my bloody machine if i didn't need it so much.

perhaps all it needed was threats.

after being handed over for a good sorting out there appeared to be nothing wrong with it.


at all.



so not only was it wasting my time but it made me look like a big fat liar.

if that's what they do these days then that is one seriously screwed up computer virus.


i don't realy understand.

a slither of anxiety

.





turning the light off and praying for peace
teeth clenched and gut wrenched
as the noise and emotion become too much to bear.




.

number two

this is the second of two tracks that were completed in quick succesion of each other, as stated last time i did intend to tweek it slightly but due to obvious reasons i haven't actually been able to, but rather than hold it back i thought i would put this out into the world and not keep pondering going back to it for the smallest of changes



Number 16 track two by Hunchbakk

and so here we are, another track from the new 'number 16' project:

no real agenda in mind, just an outlet for some works that may not fit elsewhere


and as with the previous track in the project this is a bit of a mash-up of my own work and the works of others and actually stems from an idea i'd had while out cycling with my generic mp3 player on shuffle

going off on a slight tangent here, but while it is easy to condemn the modern world and the digital age for the effect it may have on how we collect music and the deterioration of the album format it does open up new opportunities to be exposed to music that we didn't even know we had

i was slightly stunned to find myself listening to a track that used the same (or similar) samples (or noises) as the first track i had completed for SoundArt, especially as i was completely unsure as to what the track was and how it had found it's way onto my generic mp3 player

turns out it was a track called Inevitable by Realistic Crew, which didn't realy mean an awful lot to me but it was part of a Clash playlist that i had downloaded and can usualy be trusted to feature innovative music, some that is already on my radar but also a good quality selection of new discoveries and diamonds in the rough

and right there and then i knew that i would be able to take the vocals i had recorded for SoundArt1 and transfer them onto the simarly haunting ambience of Inevitable, decision made and i continued to pedal on....


oh, but of course i didn't cycle home and knuckle down with creating a frankenstein of a track, don't be so silly, instead it must have taken me weeks to pull my finger out and work on it, it wasn't until i'd finished chopping up the words of Peter Porter that i just let my creative juices flow, completeing one track and then cracking on with opening up a new file and starting splicing all over again

and i'm so happy with the results, i'm unsure whether i prefer this new machination to the original but i love the fact that they both seem to be coming from the same place and exist within similar stratospheres

enjoy

rarely glimpsing digital grimaces

(image 'borrowed' from www.slutever.blogspot.com)

i'd become kind of stuck with my poetry, i'd hit a wall, everything i wanted to write about i had already written about and i didn't want to repeat myself over and over.

i hadn't written anything for a while, until last friday.

boredom induced clicking was taking me back to the same websites i check several times a day despite a lack of updates.  but i realised that i had not been over to Slutever in a while, it is deserving of more than just a casual glance to waste afew minutes, it is a blog with heady tales of bohemia, of squats and drugs and sex.

in short it is pretty much everything my blog (and my life) isn't.

Slutever provides me with an escape, in much the same way that i have a disturbing number of herion fixated books (Motley Crue: The Dirt, Trainspotting, Anthony Kiedis: Scar Tissue, the list goes on....) on my shelf at home yet have never touched drugs in my life...

it is filthy and slightly dangerous, yet viewed from a safe distance.

but one post in particular... and to a certain extent, a second... sent my synapses firing, thoughts and inspiration and online lives, obsessing over social networks and how we wish to be percieved.  i tapped away and soon i had a new poem.



this one is dedicated to Karley, Mavi and Theresa:



peering
pouring over digital images
rarely glimpsing digital grimaces
youth
edit
smile
edit
only fools view the blurred life
only fools parade their private lives
and still retain the date stamp
edit
truth can be betrayed by portrayal
edit
why live the life that nobody wants
edit
your life is so much better and now
you can
edit
prove it




.

i'm sick in your mouth

while everybody else is getting all excited about bohemiem hipster, Darwin Deez, they seem to be forgetting about our very own homegrown urban troubadour, Dev Hynes aka Lightspeed Champion.

and judging by the fact that he not only has a new album out but has also been working with Diane Vickers on her own material, i'm guessing he does more than just hand around at afterskool these days (does he still go, it's been a long while since i've been there?)


i'm not sure where this is all heading, all i really wanted to do was give you a little bit of spiel before showing you the latest Lightspeed Champion video that i have been obsessing over, which i find equally disturbing and curious, mostly down to the oh-so cheesey grins and weird looks that Dev gives to the camera for the whole running time of the clip, aided by the fact that the chorus is extremely catchy and refuses to leave my head for days after watching this.....



and if you like it as much as i do, Madame Van Damme is available to download from amazon right now, go on, you know you can't resist it!

fight!

once again i am in awe of Akira The Don.... sickening, sickening awe!!

his latest output is amazing, and i honestly think that this is not gushing enough.

his previous superhero themed mixtape had some outstanding touches of brilliance on it, and the quality control does not let up, if anything i think it may have been improved upon for what Akira himself admitted was intended to be an days worth of mashing up some old 16bit SNES tunes and a handful of inspired old joints but ended up being an epic three week task turning out a geeking freaking masterpiece of retro gaming nostalgia

ATD23: The Street Fighter Mixtape is so much more than it more than it deserves to be.

Akira The Don - ATD23 - The Street Fighter Mixtape by Akira The Don

perhaps that little build up didn't sell it enough, there has been hard work gone into this thing and it shows.  hard work, love and a hell of a lot of skills, courtesy of Akira himself and his co-collaborators !!

the quality control is definetely what places this mixtape head and shoulders above anything else of its ilk, from searing rap vocals to laid back grooves and inventive sampling, all of these factors come together like a 12 hit combo that would leave no competitor standing.

it would be a severe injustice to overlook this mixtape as just 52 minutes of beat-em-up influenced music, even if the subject matter seems a little niche this still stands alone as an extremely well constructed album that has far outgrown the gimmicky premise of its creation.

cop the whole thing, in track seperated CD quality over here





and i'll even forgive Akira for encrouching on my personal thoughts and intentions, as he has only gone and bloody recycled an old chorus from britpop also-rans Rialto, a chorus from the song that i intended to cover and had already recorded the vocals for about a month ago, but have sat around on my hard drive doing not very much since.......

oh well, i snoozed and i loozed.

player 1, you win!!

only words

i am rediscovering a passion for writing.

perhaps you can tell since the blog posts seem to be swelling a little lately, i actually want to have a bit of informative content on here (even if most of it may be pretty irrelavent).

i've got a ton of ideas that i would like to transfer to articles or blog posts but sometime it's just a case of trying to find the time to do it, along with all the other bloody stuff that i have the best intentions of getting on with.

but for now i'm just gonna keep this one short(ish) and point you in the direction of my recent writing....

Bank Holiday weekend i managed to get myself on the guestlist (thanks glasswerk) for Deadmau5 at Brixton Academy and the resulting article can be found here.

My review of They Live has just been published in this week's Enfield Advertiser which you can either take a look back at on my blog or can be viewed in the online digital copy of the paper (page24)

and i also think my recent blog posts are worth a bit of a read (but i am a little biased) so maybe peruse some of the latest offerings in which i have tried to stretch myself a little more.... i'd suggest my father's son and inspiration (in which i also previewed a new track which you can download)

and maybe check back tomorrow as i'm currently toying with a new piece that should be posted up quite soonish.....

profesional couple

so the casual observer will probably have gathered by now that i am house hunting with my girlfriend.

and it is a horrible job.

the initial excitement of being all grown up and actually buying a property that is gonna be yours soon gives way to viewing houses located near notorious estates, taking an instant dislike to any 'neighbours' that you have seen hanging around and realising that if you had just afew more thousand pounds everything would be glorious and we could be kicking back in a nice three bed semi within walking distance of Enfield Town.

despite all this i am determined to see this thing through and am fiercely anti-renting and pro-buying, refusing to let my hard earned pay off somebody elses mortgage other than my own.

but here is a property that could have changed my mind, it could have been worth it just for the geeky claim to fame.

cos not long ago the Spaced flat was available to rent, yep the actual factual flat shared by Tim and Daisy!!

to be honest i have no real interest in living in the Tufnell park area of London, but it would have made repeated viewings of the DVD box set a hell of a lot more interesting, no doubt Spaced re-enactments would have been an everyday occurence that would never ever stop being funny and i may even decide to try my hand at being a freelance comic book artist!!

oh, i can dream can't i.

back to rightmove.com i think.




credit where it's due:

i spotted this way too late over at topless robot

fatality

it seems that my computer has been struck down by one of those ridiculous viruses that trys to fool you by passing itself off as something that looks like an anti-virus programme.

now, i am smart enough to know the difference between the anti-virus i already have installed (yeah, good job anti-virus by the way) and this ridiculous corrupting masquerading imposter, but never the less it has somehow found it's way into my computer despite me trying to pull the plug on my internet, swiftly turn off my machine and surround the stupid computer with garlic to try and keep the foul virus at bay.


so now my time is spent trying to back up my important files while various warnings and webpages for porn and viagra keep trying to load up, and obviously this will have a knock-on effect for writing my articles and making music.

this is however the kick up the arse i need to pack my PC off to the doctors and hopefully get it cured of all it's ailments, which means i should hopefully have a couple of fully functioning microphone inputs for recording and a CD tray that actually opens and closes so i can continue clogging up my i-tunes

the downside tho is that the CD that was in the tray when it decided to give up is Spice Girl Mel B's debut solo album, which is kind of embarrascing, but that is why i thought i would post up the video of I Want You Back featuring Missy Elliott, the only track i actually ripped into my i-tunes, as proof that this admission of owning the album realy isn't as bad as it seems (is it?)



aaaaaarggghhhhh!! this was the best quality video i could find but it cuts off most of the intro, full version.... but hella worse quality right here

inspiration

my last post was gonna be alot longer, but it already seemed to be lengthening somewhat and at the same time going nowhere so i thought i should maybe cut it off before it became a very long-winded big bunch of nothingness that should have actually been about unveiling a new track.

so lets unveil a new track right now.

Peter Porter 1929 - 2010

Number 16 track one by Hunchbakk

but when i say new it isn't actually that new

it is in fact the first track that i made for my 'album' which i have been making since i first got my hands on Sony Acid, it is also the first track on the album and opens things up nicely for what follows

the words have been around a lot longer than the music, i couldn't find exactly when it was written but it is a poem by Peter Porter, an Australian born poet who had been publishing his poetry since 1958.

it was my dad that inspired me to create this little mashed-up track, even though i hadn't actually heard of Peter Porter (not that i can clearly recollect anyway) my dad emailed me, telling me that he had died - in the email he had also included Porter's poem 'Your Attention Please', written in the form of a public service announcement, and told me that it had caused afew over reactions in the 50s when read out on a radio poetry show and people tuning in thought that nuclear attack was actually happening


i was intrigued by the poem and right there and then the inspiration hit me to pair up my piece of music with the foreboding words of 'Your Attention Please' but try as hard as i might to find a decent reading of the poem, all i could find was a crappy sounding version made for somebodys class project that had found it's way onto youtube.

downheartened but undeterred i kept searching, and stumbled upon a reading of another Peter Porter poem, this one called 'Consumer Report' in which life is treated as a product and mused upon as if giving feedback for market research purposes.

and all of a sudden i had something better than i had even hoped for, the nature and the tone of the poem instantly appealed and i knew it would speak to my dad too

i must admit i have chopped up the poem slightly, taken out parts that didn't realy fit with what i wanted and moved other parts round so that it worked within the music and still made sense within itself

it shall remain nameless for now, it will probably form part of a new project and i have another track almost complete that needs just the smallest of tweakings before i share

but this one is for my Dad, and for the memory of Peter Porter

my father's son

(my grandad's wall)

last week was the second week in a row that i had ventured out of the house in a sleeveless top in my neverending quest to defeat this stupid t-shirt sun tan.

i spent a day out and about wandering around with my Dad, it started as a walk from mine to his which usualy takes 15 minutes but instead the whole journey took somewhere around 4 hours or so, possibly more.

we set off after a slice of watermelon each and as i'd already shown him a couple of houses that i'd seen on the market i thought we might as well take in a couple of detours so he could see a couple more that i may or may not have been interested in.

and so a quick walk turned into a longer walk which turned into a trip down memory lane for the both of us as we cut through wastelands and fields, A-road neighbouring forests and dirt tracks, chatting the whole way, about places my Dad used to take me and my brother when we were younger, and places that my Dad had been when he was younger.

we contemplated past times and good times and ended up walking in a very non-direct way to Cheshunt where my Dad grew up. we stopped at the corner of the graveyard my grandparents are buried in and from there my dad pointed out the resting place of a school caretaker he once helped out when he was a child.

we went where things used to be, we found the back garden wall that my grandad had built and some friendly neighbourhood types chatted with us and helped fill in some of the blanks in my Dad's memory.


the time spent together is so much more than i could ever realy sum up in this meandering blog post and meant a hell of a lot more to me than i ever realised it could, but like last months wedding it reminds you who your family realy are and when you put so much focus on looking forward it's sometimes good to look back.

pop music

jeez, i was actually planning on uploading this earlier this week but time just got away from me before i managed to do so.

yes, it's a slight cop out cos it's only posting up another video instead of some realy informative content.

but after that M.I.A vid i felt the need to share another nine minute music video, this time, the King of Pop and the video for Smooth Criminal courtesy of VH1's pop up video show from back in the day

yeah, back in the day, when only three music channels actually existed and they all played music videos.

what a glorious time that was, when being a British teenager often meant that you spent any time in front of the telly flicking between MTV and The Box and if they weren't showing any titillating videos of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera then you may switch over to check out VH1 instead

oh, the reminiscing

enjoy