Tinnitus Awareness Week 2012

i don't buy the red tops on matter of principle

but many people that i know do, and i will still find myself flicking through the pages of absurd, lowest common denominator news and celebrity tittle tattle

so it is with some surprise that i occasionally find The Sun actually broaching a serious subject that more people need to be aware of, it is just such a shame that the real story they should be covering is always so brief

and as we near the end of another Tinnitus Awareness week, i thought i should do my duty to highlight the problem again, after my initial piece published in 2010

it was also in 2010 that i read a short article regarding Black Eyed Peas head honcho, producer and solo artist, Will.i.am, admitting that he was suffering from tinnitus, a high pitched ringing in the ears that is caused by prolonged exposure to loud music, and is common among musicians, DJs, clubbers and gig-goers

sadly the article swiftly shifted the focus onto his much-rumoured relationship with Cheryl Cole and his staunch support of that years X-Factor contestant, Cher Lloyd (an expanded article, including more name dropping, but also an opinion from The Sun doctor can be found here)



and then, just last week, almost perfectly timed to coincide with the annual campaign to highlight the causes and prevention of Tinnitus, N-Dubz lead and now solo-artist, Dappy revealed that due to his severe tinnitus he has now had small speakers installed around his bed to play soothing background noises, so that he is less aware of the constant ringing that is most obvious, and often frustrating, when you realise that you can no longer hear 'silence'.

of course, the newspaper was more interested in getting there jolleys by mocking his band's music and thinking up a shockingly bad rhyming headline rather than providing any real support or advice for anyone that may find themselves in a similar situation to Will.i.am and Dappy.

suffering since 2004 myself, i was relieved when i was first handed a leaflet about earplugs while at Glastonbury, not feeling quite so alone and happy to be pointed in the right direction for where to find advice and suitable hearing protection

and i believe that as a duty to fans and gig goers, more should be said about the causes and effects of Tinnitus so that people can hopefully spot the signs early enough to spare themselves the fate shared by not only Dappy and Will.i.am, but also Bono, Trent Reznor, Pete Townsend and Moby, among many others





more information about Tinnitus and Tinnitus Awareness Week can be found in this article by the great Eddy TM and on the British Tinnitus Association website

meeting a hero.

perhaps it is slightly old fashioned to pass on a demo CD to someone.

i like to think of it as nostalgic instead.


and this is the story of how, with clammy palms, i handed over my CD to Eddy Temple Morris yesterday:




so perhaps my own self-promotion has been a little bit lax of late, perhaps my own musical work ethic has been a little lax of late, i have become accustomed to the truth of the mater that these things will happen when moving into a home, my own home, with the other half (well, half hers too actually)

the spare bedroom has one blue wall and one white wall that i have taken it upon myself to paint, the remaining wall is still that nasty possible-magnolia-really? colour that it has been since we moved in, i would have painted it except she has talked about stripping the textured wall paper from the walls and i don't want to have painted it all for nothing

and yes, the room does actually have four walls, but one is entirely taken up by fitted wardrobes, although i did once consider painting them

but this isn't a case of decoration, this is more a matter that i fully intend to move all my kit into that room and it become my little haven to hide in and create whilst she watches television downstairs, but for now the computer still sits around downstairs, leaving my creativity rather stunted when she turns the tv on

plus, once you consider all the time i actually end up watering the garden, cleaning this, washing that, cooking something, and a whole bunch of other household chores that i hadn't really anticipated yet feel duty bound to complete so i don't end up living in a complete shit hole, there just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day to fire up the machine and start manipulating sounds

and with all this repeatedly happening since last september, why should i waste an opportunity to burn a number of tracks i am proudest of and pass them along to one of my all-time musical heroes?!

Eddy TM would be DJing as part of Akira The Don's album launch party, and Eddy TM is a DJ that i have huge love and huge respect for, and i am extremely proud that he has played one of my remixes on his long running Xfm show, aptly named The Remix

so i pondered the structure of the CD, settling on an equal mix of original material and remixes, including The Enemy remix that he had already aired, and a rejigged Akira The Don track, since it only seemed appropriate

now, i have been training myself to not act like a complete fanboy when meeting famous people, but those that i hold in the highest esteem still cause an outbreak of hysterics in me, and it was no different when Eddy walked past me, i wasn't even facing him, and yet i felt his prescence (or perhaps caught him in the corner of my eye) and my heart skipped a beat

the plan was to grab a little chat with him and try and retain a sense of composure, but the gig moved swiftly and i would have felt that i was disrespecting the performer and Eddy himself if i tried to catch his attention and hold a conversation during a gig

and so there was nothing left to do but approach him whilst he DJed, seriously, the guy is a consummate professional, graciously accepting the CD from me and even holding a slightly disjointed rhetoric as he cued up and mixed tracks whilst observing that i wasn't going anywhere just yet

i introduced myself, told him how much i thought of him, allowed him to do what he had to do, and then continued to tell him that he had played a track of mine before, at which point Eddy took a little more notice, looking over the almost unreadable tracklisting in the poor lighting and acknowledging that, yeah, he remembered it

he then remarked that he thought we had met before, blimey! either he is an extremely gracious person making a lucky guess, but i believe that i saw recognition in his eyes, i didn't expect for him to remember at all,  it must have been a good couple of years ago at least, but i'll quite happily live with the belief that Eddy TM not only is a great DJ, but also a great human being with superhuman skills of recollection

we briefly discussed the artwork of the promo, that he loved, and that i admitted to half-inching and not really being able to claim as my own, and then i said i would leave him to it, he had a job to do after all, and i left beaming...

i hope that he will give it a listen and i hope that he will enjoy it, i would be bloody ecstatic if he saw fit to air anything from it but that is regardless, the most important thing is that he is something of a hero of mine and that in the two brief moments that i have been able to converse with him, Eddy has been nothing less than a complete gentleman and an all-round nice guy

and i couldn't ask for anything more than that when meeting a personal hero

Akira The Don - Music of the Spheres ft. Mary Turner (Hunchbakk's dirty elbows mix) by Hunchbakk

the barnyard battle

how foolish of me, there i was yesterday, typing up a long-awaited blog post and i only go and leave out something of relevance that i wanted to point readers in the direction of.

instead, you get more apologies and an extra post which i guess makes things look just a little bit more active around these parts.



so.

dubstep.


when i'm writing articles or features for The Enfield Advertiser (or possibly Seeking Susan Boyle or Glasswerk) i try to cover most bases, obviously the paper i try to anchor with local interest to keep it relevant, but i also like to mix in reviews of other artists, be they popular or rather niche, and i try to convey myself in my writing by offering up a number of opinion pieces.

something that i had been giving a fair bit of consideration to was the current state of dubstep, particularly how in the course of a year it went from bubbling on the underground, to spawning it's own 'pop'stars in the form of Katy B and Magnetic Man.

but writing takes a little time and commitment, and when i very rarely have an official deadline to meet for any of the platforms my pieces appear on, sometimes these ideas tend to slide.

so while i have been spending time becoming increasingly bored of social networking and waiting for something new to set a fire under my life, or just sinking my head deeper and deeper into comics, Eddy TM has overtaken me and given his own opinion on dubstep's current standing.

i won't bother to repeat any of it here, since it is well worth a read in it's own right.

and perhaps i'll pull my finger out, surprise even myself, and deliver a complete dubstep mix, aaand a dubstep article this week.

we'll see, eh?

credit where it's due:


accompanying image 'weird mouse' by Leo Loikkanen

delayed by snow? stuck in the post?

i try to be creative

i also try to be giving


and at no other time is this more appropriate than at christmas.

i have already displayed my dismay at not being able to get an actual 'christmas single' ready for the past couple of years, but by way of consolation, and arriving just a day late is the newest track i have created, inspired by this year's Cage Against The Machine campaign

Cage Against The Machine - 4'33" (Hunchbakk's personal experience of tinnitus mix) by Hunchbakk

this is my own interpretation of John Cage's 4'33", and the main inspiration behind it was Eddy TM's involvement with the campaign to take 4'33" to Christmas number one, and how sales of the single would benefit a number of charities, including the British Tinitus Association, of which Eddy is a patron.

so instead of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, or a 4 and a half minute soundtrack of my surroundings as some of the remixes have been, i decided that i should emphasise the tracks links to tinnitus, and try to reproduce what my tinnitus actually sounds like, to convey the discomfort and annoyance caused by my own suffering from tinnitus.


for the most accurate results, go about your daily life as usual and listen to this track at random moments throughout the day and night... at any given moment i will go from barely being able to notice my own tinnitus, to having a sudden and increased ringing in my left ear that will gradually fade over a short length of time, sometimes i am aware of a faint ringing in my ears, other times i am not, but it is most noticable when experiencing what should be silence



-PLEASE DO NOT LISTEN TO AT LOUD VOLUMES-




other remixes of 4'33" are also available to listen to on the Remix Against The Machine soundcloud page, and for further reading and food for thought, may i point you in the direction of Eddy TM's own musings on this years yuletide chart battle, and his annoyance at not only CATM's lowly chart placing but also a lack of support and concern from certain quarters

sound art experiment number 8

well it turned out to be quite a geek week over here didn't it.

let's remedy that by sorting you out with some free music, the latest installment in the much delayed SoundArt project.

we're up to number 8 and i have already recieved the artwork for number 9 and am brainstorming ideas at the mo, but lets not let this one pass us by too quickly.

may i present to you, the Art and the Sound of SoundArt8



SoundArt8 by Hunchbakk

and for those of you that aren't quite sure what you are looking at, the above piece of artwork was infact a CD case with cassete tape wound tightly inside, to give the impression of something resembling a Reel to Reel, but also looking like a CD at the same time.

which didn't exactly fill me with inspiration.

instead i decided that it would be a blank canvas for me to work with and decide what i was going to do, which was also rather fitting considering the nature of a blank cassete.

so i set about gathering ideas and even up until the last day working on the track i was still adding ideas as they came to me, much like a cassete tape would be recorded onto over and over.

so i sampled tracks that i heard that appealed to me most, i dug through a pile of minidiscs and snatched short snippets of audio from shows i'd recorded off the radio, i actually sampled a very worn out tape which has quite clearly seen better days.

and although the finished item may not exactly sound like a track that has been worked on for a number of months it still stands as an experimental piece drawing inspiration (and samples) from a number of sources and i would like to acknowledge Big Audio Dynamite, Instra:Mental, D-mob, David Rodigan, John Peel, Steve Lamacq, Eddy TM, Jo Whiley, Akira The Don, Thom Yorke, Bill Hicks and Paul Kaye who all unwittingly contributed.

wash. rinse. repeat.

time keeps on ticking by and i'm trying to keep this blog varied, but if you don't mind i just want to hark back breifly to my Enfield Advertiser articles again, in particular the Tinnitus article

just because Tinnitus Awareness week has been and gone, and my article has been published, doesn't mean i should just let you forget about it now

not only is there plenty of info over at www.tinnitus.org.uk but if you scroll down to the section titled Launch Event you can also download yourself a free mp3 of the full One Tune, One Cause DJ set

One Tune, One Cause DJs - Tinnitus Awareness Week DJ set @ Cargo 08.02.10

and for anyone following (and anyone that cares) this article was published in this weeks Enfield Advertiser which you can read online (page 24)

Eh?

i have submitted this to be published in The Enfield Advertiser, but i thought it too important to wait for publishing

the more people that are aware of tinnitus, the better

and i only hope that my article will persuade people to start wearing hearing protection before it realy is too late




the garage. may 2004

The Futureheads, supported by The Cribs.

gig-going had become a ridulously regular part of my social life and i was here to see two bands touring in support of acclaimed debut albums released earlier that year. the venues would only get bigger from here.

it was a loud place to be, just left of the moshing and right infront of the speaker stack. i left with my ears ringing, and the next morning i woke up with my ears still ringing.

a day and a half later and the ringing finally subsided, but this was my first scare, the first time i realised that maybe i was doing damage to my hearing.

i wish that somebody had told me back then the risks of exposure to loud music.



The British Tinnitus Association recently appointed Xfm DJ Eddy Temple-Morris as an ambassador of their cause, who in turn brought together a number of peers and fellow sufferers to raise awareness with a free event held at Cargo in Shoreditch.

kicking off the night were live band, Burn The Negative, a swaggering cross between Editors and Kasabian being kicked to the curb by Primal Scream that had made the long trip down from Carlisle purely to play a short set in support of a good cause.

and when they were done, the soundclash began.

the plan. to gather more than 20 DJs and musicians to play just one tune each to create a constant two hour mix of music.

London rapper MC Chickaboo was first up, performing a song detailing her own experiences of damaged hearing, before the DJs took over.

Drum n Bass, breakbeat, house, dubstep, electronica and more made up the 2 hour long mix featuring DJs, producers and bands with tunes being dropped by Adam F, Jon Carter, Jagz Kooner, Babyshambles' Adam Ficek, Lottie, Loose Cannons, Xpress-2 and Eddy TM's own Losers among many many more.

as a tinnitus sufferer myslef it was important to me to see such a strong campaign that i can spread the word on myself.

and its also important to me to carry on going to gigs and clubs without damaging my hearing further, as i have been using ear protection of varying costs for the past six years.

my first pair of earplugs cost me £6 online and were delivered in a matter of days, just before the next gig i'd booked tickets for. My next pair of earplugs, a custom fitted pair that cost an awful lot more than my first plugs are now an essential whenever i fill my pockets before heading out.

as Eddy TM explains 'If you're on a tight budget, then you can get decent off-the-peg earplugs for less than a round of drinks, and even those yellow spongy ones are better than nothing. They're not ideal sound-wise because they tend to muffle things, but that's got to be better than getting tinnitus'

Eddy says...

so let's keep this blog moving.

i was gona post up something else, i was considering posting up my own experiences of tinnitus, but EDDy TM's little article from The Remix Update mailout was so passionate and so spot on that i thought it rude not to share his words of wisdom on tinnitus

I remember the carefree days of going to a gig, blasting my eardrums with glorious and beautiful music, then getting home with a ringing in my ears. How long it lasted depended on the volume, I guess. I'd always have trouble getting to sleep, but it would almost always be gone by the next morning or the day after that. I thought it was just part and parcel of going to a gig. Van Halen at Birmingham Civic Centre Coliseum in Alabama set an unbeaten record of about a week, but it always went away eventually. Then, one day, about a decade ago... it didn't.

I have a constant high-pitched tone in one or both of my ears, and it's something I carry with me always, wherever I go. I don't notice it in the day, there's too much ambient noise in London, even at night. It's when I go somewhere really quiet, in the countryside, that it really affects me. I lie down to sleep and, with the absence of planes, trains and automobiles, I realise the awful truth that I cannot hear the silence. That lovely sense of total quiet, of blissful peace, is something I will never experience again. Please don't let this happen to you. It's so easy to prevent it, just get some earplugs. Please.

If you're a musician, a DJ, a producer or if you simply go to a lot of gigs or clubs, then you MUST invest in a pair of fitted earplugs. It's the best £175 I ever spent. I never get that ringing after gigs anymore, and my tinnitus hasn't got any worse since I started wearing them, it's even got a little better.

If you're on a tight budget, then you can get decent off-the-peg earplugs for less than a round of drinks, and even those yellow spongy ones are better than nothing, and you can get them for about as much as a bag of crisps. They're not ideal sound-wise because they tend to muffle things, but that's got to be better than getting tinnitus.

The whole point is to raise awareness. The British Tinnitus Association, who have bugger all funding, yet still manage to pay for a phoneline so people who are having a hard time dealing with their tinnitus have someone to turn to and talk to.

As long as I have the power to do something about it, I'll communicate, pressure, evangelise, talk, listen, rant, and anything else I can think of to make sure that you don't find yourself in the same position as me and all these other huge hearted artists on the bill, of never hearing silence again.

Much love,
eddy X

www.tinnitus.org.uk



credit where it's due:

the article was half-inched from CMU

not too loud

if you're like me, you love music.

and if you love music you should probably love your hearing.

and if you love music and your hearing so much i hope you've been using protection!


today is the start of Tinnitus Awareness Week in the UK, and it is something i feel very strongly about, since i already suffer from tinnitus.

exposure to loud music is something that music fans will always have to deal with, but the ringing left in your ears shouldn't be.

kicking off this awareness week is a charity event at Cargo in Shoreditch tonight, curated by Eddy TM and featuring a ton of DJs and artists that have been affected by tinnitus throwing down one tune each.

so this is a brief heads up about the event and about the cause

more info can be found on:

www.tinnitus.org.uk

facebook event page

and on the cargo website

my favourite waste of time

and that there is Akira The Don's supreme mash-up that is rocking the internet and tore up Eddy TM's Remix show all time top ten record last week and is now posing a challenge on his own website

Akira spent bloomin ages slaving over this mix last week to cram 210 tracks into 10 minutes

and now is asking followers of his website to try and spot and name as many of those tracks as they possibly can


so i used my time constructively (as u may notice from the comments i left) and i'd like to think i'll be stomping around in a fetch pair of Don Shoes sometime soon

everybody's Free / camera phone - part 1

first remix all-nighter in quite a while, my first time clubbing at Matter in the O2, and so i could report back my findings i thought i'd take a few pics of the night, it's just a shame that i couldn't fit my camera into the pockets of my skinny fit jeans

so i present to you a dual part, dual purpose post - to give a brief recap of the night and also to realy test the quality of my camera phone

it's a Sony Ericson, it's a Cyber-shot, does that mean it should be a little bit super-duper for capturing the moment as the adverts suggest?

i'll let you judge for yourself from some, erm, rather amazing live shots of the bands...




Arriving at the O2 at around about midnight-ish and making our way into Matter, we were greeted by some friendly doorstaff, a friendly name-taker for the mailing list and the news that due to unforeseen circumstances (low ticket sales?) Room 2 would be closed, it seemed that an experience similar to stumbling around exploring/getting lost in sister club Fabric would not be on the cards tonight

in contrast, Fabric usualy has a queue around the block by half ten, Matter at midnight just didn't come close tonight with an almost empty dance-floor, but given half an hour it had filled a little and there was general skanking to the dub-steppy goodness of N-type and Youngsta's set.

Did the sudden appearance of a stage in Room 1 surprise any other Mater virgins? we'd been wondering where the performances would take place before getting distracted by dancing, what i mistook for a wall were in fact black curtains, pulled back to reveal Freeland...



making a fair racket by enlisting a live band and recording a new album, Adam Freeland is something of a Remix legend so it's only right that his tour should cross paths with the all-nighter, the man himself behind synths and knobs and a laptop, joined by a guitarist and a drummer to work through a live set heavily weighted to promote forthcoming 'Cope' before closing with the classic 'We Want Your Soul'



after a DJ set from Herve, next up were New York duo, Shy Child, managing to shake the crowd up with only a keytar and a drumkit and leaving their signature track 'Drop The Phone' reverberating in my mind for most of the next day, keeping things multicultural were French DJs/producers The Shoes with a quick set before the third live band of the, erm, morning took to the stage.



half three in the AM and Trip and his band play for a slightly depleted audience but he still performs with gusto, it's just a shame that too much of his vocals were lost in the music, none of the songs came across loud and clear but radio botherer 'River Phoenix' was still recognisable with it's Mike Skinner meets the Arctic Moneys indie scamp swagger.

4 o'clock came and went and Remix head honcho, Eddy TM, took to the decks, but our alcohol reserves were running low by this point and the daunting prospect of a long journey home ahead of us we made a move for the night buses

Overall, a bloody good night, as much about the live acts as it was the DJs, a balance that gave the event focus, and the closing of Room 2 perhaps helped to keep the all-nighter fluid and well paced as the concentrated bill ran to schedule and the atmosphere never showed any signs of being as tired as i had every right to be

we didn't last til 6 in the morn but i think we showed definite staying power and may have stuck around long enough for first trains if the Jubilee Line was actualy running on Saturday



and my camera-phone's performance? pah, pretty pathetic realy, judge for yourself above as you try to make out which colourful blobs are which bands.

but the night wasn't quite over, and neither was the camera phone fun, but i'll leave that til the next post

blood splashing

had afew computer issues yesterday, i thought i mite have posted about the fact that although everyone had been whinging about it for ages, the recession is now official (some boring statistic about the rate of something or other dropping for the blah blah blah...) or that i'm still reading Bill Bryson.

Alas, this post is about neither, as obsessed as i am about music, this shall be about music. I'm not gonna become another of the many multiplying music blogs, i just wanna share a little enthusiasm.

I could have posted about Littles, his new mixtape that i was listening to this morning and the amazing new track 'Skank Out' but instead i felt compelled to blog about the mysterious Fake Blood who smashed it last year with 'Mars', 'Blood Splashing' and a smattering of remixes.

Compelled, since last night on Xfm, i heard Eddy TM mention that Fake Blood is none other than DJ Touche, perhaps this is common knowledge that had passed me by, I loved his previous work such as 'The Paddle' and even way back further than that to his days in 'The Wiseguys' ('ooh la la' was ten years ago??)

I'd love to share A Fake Blood track with you but i see a handful of other forums have had tracks removed by request, and i don't wanna step on no-ones toes.

Their ain't even any official videos to check out, so maybe jus check his myspace and if you like what you hear, shell out for it on i-tunes or something

2008: Year of the Bat. part 1

I usually like to start the year in such a clichéd fashion as to look back over the previous year that has just passed, and as usual I’m running late.

But to be honest I think I covered a lot of ground in my previous blog that recapped all my tracks I’ve got available to download right now, so this may be a brief overview of what has come and gone and which, by all accounts has been a bloody good year for me.

I managed to have my most productive year to date. Producing remixes of The Enemy, Radiohead, Marvin, The Freewheelin’ Troubadour and Akira the Don (twice) and also finally finishing the remix of Komakino that I started way back in sumfin silly like summer ’07.

In terms of my original tracks, I completed ‘teen-aging’ to a demo standard that I am happy with, finished another new track, made a start on another one and also found the time to record my very own ‘christmas single’.

Perhaps the project I’m most excited about is the new Sound/Art experiment I have started with my little brother, the first of which is available to download til the end of January and which I still intend to dedicate a whole blog entry to.

Been a good year in terms of exposure too, considering I have previously had none. In a rather short space of time I’d had my remix of The Enemy featured on Keep Hope Inside, played by Eddy TM on Xfm and also played on radio in New Zealand. The Joint in NZ were also good enough to play out another one of my older tracks too and Saam at Keep Hope Inside blogged about my Radiohead remix which probably sent my music around the world afew more times, cos everyone loves new Radiohead material, and the track was even picked up and spread around by a handful of other blogs.

Also giving me a little extra push last year were Marvin and Akira The Don. Marvin also found a lil space for my Enemy remix on his own blog and then gave me the chance to remix his latest single and Akira featured one of the two remixes I produced of his tracks on his latest mixtape.

So, huge thanks to Saam, Eddy TM, the folks at The Joint, Marvin and Akira The Don, and anyone else who has given my music a chance this past year