A lovely relaxing weekend - I would have done this update then but still doomed to treacle slow dial up at present.
On friday night A. and I went to see The Others - the new Nicole Kidman film. I was lucky enough to go and see it knowing absolutely nothing about it except that Kidman was in it. It is in my opinion an excellent film - it is a classic ghost story, it relies on good story telling rather than gory special effects. The old house, the mist, the muted colours. The use of music is sparse (something that they could have pushed further I felt - we are so used to music dictating the mood in films). The twists and turns are nothing you won't have read elsewhere if you like this kind of thing but it is the telling that is done well. Although it works well in the cinema - this would be a great film to watch on DVD late at night on your own for best effect.
On saturday we went to see the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at Edinburgh Gallery of Modern art. Having read a lot about her work it was intriguing to see it in real life. Art very rarely works refracted through magazines, television and books - even classic things like Dali, Picasso or Renaissace work has a stunning presence in real life that you can not even imagine even if you have see reproductions every day of your life.
Whitereads work is very minimal - casts of familiar everyday objects: bookcases, beds, or the spaces around them. The center piece is the cast of the entire stair space of a house. Despite their similarity some of the works I found very engaging - the book shelf pieces and the cast of the space under a table and its chair done in some translucent material. Other pieces didn't really effect me at all. The work has a haunting lost quality that I like though.
Spent some time over the weekend exploring the pulsar at the heart of my studio and making sounds for the two projects I am working on right now: The album I started last year - Out amongst the Beacons and the Storytellers project. Both are comming along well. I also made the track below.
Shallow Breath (mp3, 3,997KB, 4:15 )
This is a sketch of a track that may well appear on "out amongst the beacons". The title comes from a Rachel Whiteread sculpture. The track is based around two samples (the breath sample being run through the Reverse Reverb preset on my MPX1 - now connected into my studio completely digitally) and some chords played on the pulsars UNKNOW 007 (a very accurate Juno 106 emulation).
NOTE: to play the mp3's that appear on these pages I would recomend the use of WinAmp if you use windows. In order to read the PDF files (see below) you will need Acrobat
Posted by Mark at November 5, 2001 10:55 AMi - Tunes is much better than winamp, if you can run it. The cataloguing features, CD burning (mp3 & aiff) and general interface leave all the other mp3 players standing. Oh. and the visuals are way cooler!!!
Posted by: Mr Steve at November 12, 2001 12:10 AM