Music, music everywhere

Okay, hopefully you know the deal by now.  Every second week, like this one, there'll be some new tunes that I've come across in the previous fortnight.  Alternate weeks I'll somehow transmutate my thoughts on the world of music into words for your eyes to process into electrical impulses that transmit themselves into your brain.  In a way it's just mind-reading.  Hear, that?  You can read minds.  Enough drivel, here's some music.

Documenting our scene

Regular readers of these ramblings will know that I spend a lot of my time out photographing gigs.  I've been doing this for about five years now, on and off, following on from a stint filming gigs for bands.

To me photographing music is more than just trying to get a pretty picture of a band I like; it's about recording and documenting the music scene.

Bands come and go frequently and as they change so does the scene.  A band might only exist in the live scene for a matter of months, playing a few gigs, or be around for a decade. Both leave their mark on the local music, through the musical ideas they created and left behind but also through the movement of musicians between bands and cities.

Having a moment of those bands captured allows us to look back and get an idea of their legacy, allows us to  remember the excitement of seeing a band live, to recapture the atmosphere of that moment.  It's another way of keeping the music alive, long after the band has disappeared.

You can check out all my music photos on Flickr, or my personal favourites on my new-ish website Light and Noise.

Loud, quiet, Loud, quiet, LOUD

Okay you crazy kids, this week we're back to some bandcamp treats that I've come across in the past couple of weeks.  There's a fifty-fifty (or phiddy for you young 'uns our there) split between mellow relaxing tunes and heavy rumbling doom.  Which is basically how I categorise people, so following my logic, there should be something for everyone here.  Enjoy, and as always, drop a comment below to let me know what you think of these tracks, or tell me what new music you've come across recently.

My earliest musical memories

Some of my earliest memories involve music.  My dad had a huge collection of jazz and blues on vinyl and on the weekends our house would reverberate to some of the greats jazz - Miles Davis, Ramsey Lewis, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Charlie Byrd, probably a stack of other people called Charlie too.

I had my own records too, mostly of children's music, but it was that exposure to jazz in particular that I think led to music being such a big part of my life and an interest in exploring new music, playing music, living music.