The invisible age

I can feel it now, creeping up behind me, the cool, chilling breath that tickles the back of my neck. it is following me around and getting closer withe every passing day.

30.

and I can't escape it any longer, it is an age I never considered facing, and yet, in the past few months, the reality of my advancing years is becoming unavoidable.


it feels like a finishing line, that now I am hurtling towards it, only so that I can cross it.

But before I get there, I want to make sure the milestone birthday greets me as a wizened man that has achieved things in his life.

My debut novel only really needs the cover artwork finalising and laying out, and I fully intend to have it published next month.

My debut album is also gaining momentum and I think an end may possibly be in sight for it, ideally with a single released in May ahead of an album release in June, which would be great timing since I mark my third decade on the planet on the thirtieth day of the sixth month of the year of our lord, two thousand and thirteen.


days off recently have been spent recording vocals and intertwining them with the music that has been sat waiting for an accompaniment, waiting for completion. and I just hope that I can pull everything together in time to make it all right, to set myself a deadline and meet it, with a hearty, manly handshake.


and in my 'real' life, things are ok there I guess, everything feels rather wrapped up and in place, with my serious relationship and our home and our plans for the future, the past year's redundancy and current entry level job on a minimum wage are not exactly ideals, hardly part of anybodies 30 year plan, but that is what life has given me, and I still have a roof over my head and a girlfriend that loves me and a family around me to support me and various friends and acquaintances in my life that help to make my life complete so I can't complain really.

But for now, the countdown ticks away the second, minutes, days and hours relentlessly.

Impact Detonation

oh, 90s comic books, what a bizarre, long and twisted love/hate relationship we have.

a relationship that I have revisited since loading a bunch of CBRs onto my gizmo, ready for reading without un-pollybagging my old issues.

back when I first laid hands on my new gizmo and took it to the Lake District with me, I powered my way through Contagion and Legacy, two back to back Batman arcs that spanned the Dark Knight Detective's titles and various spin-offs.

from what I can remember now, Contagion was so-so, and Legacy was marginally better due to the returning threat of Rās Al Ghūl, his daughter Talia and the reveal of her new suitor as Bane, making a welcome return but becoming an ultimately squandered character, since he could never really replicate the impact made since his debut in the Knightfall event.

And the problem was that after such wide spanning, multi-issue, crossing-over, behemoth storytelling that had spun Knightfall into two separate strands of Knightsquest and the seemingly concluding chapter of KnightsEnd, the last thing Batman fans really needed was another all encompassing threat to the comics world and to wallets.

which was exactly what Batman fans got when the KnightSaga span off into the rather oddly timed Prodigal and the runt of the litter Troika, which I have just finished re-reading.

very briefly, Prodigal deals with the fallout of KnightsEnd and the return of Bruce Wayne to the mantle of the bat, who then very swiftly hands it over to Dick Grayson, former Robin. Rendering the climactic climax of KnightsEnd slightly anti-climactic. After this 12 parter, Bruce Wayne comes back proper, unveiling a new batsuit (black, rather than blue and grey, and kind of pointless) and tackling Russian criminals running around being a bit rubbish all over four separate bat-titles with collectors edition embossed covers.

And that was that really, these flailing add-ons that did little to shake things up following such whopping, game-changing and era-defining cross-overs.

It was the age of comics that dragged me in, entertained and enthralled me, but to be absolutely honest... it did have a number of lows lumped in with all those highs.

The 90s was a boom era for new comic books, new artists and new tricks, I still have such a fondness for those days gone by, the regular trips to Barnet or Tottenham to stock up and get my comics fix for the week, yet all the sugar coating in the world won't change the fact thatTroika was perhaps really over stretching the gimmicks, the crossovers, and the reader's patience at the time.

a self-fulfilling prophecy

reflecting back on today's earlier blog, i decided to dig deep, digging way back through my blog posts before realising that my comments as regard to a potential completion date for my debut album were actually posted up on my myspace blog...   waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyy back in those heady days of 2008

and what exactly did i say?

'So far in the last twelve months I have yielded two and a bit tracks that I consider to be a more personal direction for my music, as well as almost a whole remix for a band that insisted there was no deadline to be met and have since split up.' 

'Considering this schedule of output, my vague plan of producing an 11 track album should reach completion around 2012/13 as long as there are no hold ups.'

of course, this was intended as a rather flippant remark, and although i have never claimed to be prolific, i had actually hoped that this would all have been done and dusted sooner rather than later.

as it stands now tho, my vague plan of producing an 11 track album should reach completion some time in 2013 as long as there are no hold ups.

view the original myspace blog here

Nearer than ever before

It would take me too long to find, but i do recall in an old (old) blog post, after purchasing Acid and taking my time to knock up a very small number of tracks, that i calculated the average time taken on them so far, factored in how many tracks i was considering having on an album, and then estimated an approximate arrival time for the finished product.

I am curious to see quite how far wrong i was with that guestimation, but having faced dry spells and computer crashes and changes of alter egos over the years, as well as just plain ol' getting on with stuff that isn't making music, i do declare that this year may very possibly (and hopefully) be the year that a debut Hunchbakk album is completed.

this is still also reliant on being able to salvage the original tracks from previous incarnatons of my computer, a task that i have dubbed 'project resurrection', as i pick through the recovered files saved to dvds and try and piece together what was once created, but foolishly not even saved for posterity in mp3 form

And so far this goes good, revealing that i was actually further along the process than i suspected myself of being, and facing the realisation that providing they all resurrect ok, that i have something like ten tracks so far in the pipeline that should be shaping up nicely for a well rounded, full length release.


expect the next update sometime around..... 2016 maybe?

not knowing.

With over a thousand songs being carried around in your pocket, it is astonishing to think that it could still be difficult to find music to suit your mood, yet, quite simply, all this choice can be rather confounding.

And so my story begins on a rather dull January morning, leaving the house and contemplating the working day and how long it is until my next day off, I need something calming, serene, distracting, and I need it now.

I scroll past bands I love, bands I'm bored of, and artists that just don't seem right for right now, and I settle upon the name Frankie Machine.

I remember very little of why, but I remember I liked it, so I choose this, and after a brief offbeat intro, I am reminded of what held so much appeal as the sound of Nineteen Seventy Three is channeled directly into my ears.

A simple acoustic track that I have missed so much that I play it twice in a row, and as I tune into the remainder of the EP from whence it originated, I wonder how I ever came across this in the first place, what website or blog must have convinced me to right-click and save as, and a most audacious thought of all, how, in this highly informed digital age, do I still have no idea who Frankie Machine is.

I literally know nothing at all about him, other than his name, and due to a couple of skits on the EP, that he had been played on radio 1 by John Peel in the era in which emails were being used by the late fan-favourite presenter.

And you know what? I actually kind of like it that way.

it would take next to no effort to google the name, possibly finding more info than I would need to know, but I won't, cos I actually like having nothing more than my own admiration of a few pieces of music to satisfy me in this age where almost everything is shared, re-posted and ubiquitously linked to facebook.

edit:  since it has always been my intention to share music, i did precocously approach google with caution, purely with the sole intention of letting you hear what i heard

i also believe that the whole EP can also still be downloaded, although i didn't hang around to find out

new years resolution....

i don't like making new years resolutions

they seem to be futile attempts to change things that tend to be quite short lived, such as gym memberships and stopping biting your fingernails

i like to think that i spend the majority of my life being the best me that i can possibly be.... but this year i want to make a change i've made a resolution to work on more music

i feel that i've been getting far too behind on quite where i wanted to be with making music, not that i expect to be topping charts and headlining stadiums, but simply being creative on a regular basis has eluded me, so it's time that i get my groove back.


so after getting in from work i fired up my computer, loaded up a handful of tracks that have been in limbo and was pleasantly surprised to find that afew tracks were further along the gestation period than i realised, and within a short space of time i managed to throw a few extra sounds together and saved a number of works in progresses as mp3s, christened them as demos that will make up part of my debut album, vowing to return to them soon to flesh them out a little more

to date, i have not publicly shared any of these album tracks, yet with a new brace of 'demos' nestling on my harddrive after what turned out to be a satisfying evening, i felt it was only right to prove my worth with a little 'show and tell', and since i've done the telling, i guess i should probably do some showing...

so here it is... a short demo of what is provisionally titled 'computer music'

 

Fearful symmetry

at just before quarter past 12 in the am, on Thursday the 20th December, I finished reading Life of Pi

Not bad going considering i only started reading it in early December, not so great considering I bought the book from a charity shop at least two years ago, and not so great considering it won the man booker prize in 2002, so must be at least ten years old by now

But I had promised myself that I would read it before the film came out, (with a UK release date of the 20th, yep, that's today, I reckon that it's fair to count that as a win on y part) although as I started seeing a few more trailers for the film, I couldn't help but think that it looked a bit dull...

yet, I decided to go ahead and read it, regardless of whether the film appealed or not

and it was a fascinating read! to a point. to an almost specific and exact point.

the book lays out a lot of background, life in India, growing up at a zoo, building identity and finding three different religions.

and it was almost just as good when we are castaway with Pi, aboard a life boat with a Bengal Tiger and a handful of other Pondicherry Zoo survivors, although this was only entertaining to a point, to the point at which you wonder where else the story can actually go.

and then it goes slightly surreal, firstly delirious, then verging on sci-fi, and then just rather odd as it cannonballs towards the almost unsatisfying end.

and I'm still unsure whether I still wanna bother seeing it or not, although now I am slightly more curious to see what has and what has not made it into the film from the book

and all the reviews I have heard so far have unanimously agreed that the film is visually amazing, which it very well may be with special effects at their peak, but is the film any good??!....