Category Archives: Music

A New Life

Fallen in deep love with Jim James’ solo record. Why? First off, this song and video:

This song works for me on so many levels. First off the obvious love song level. But tbh right now, at this stage in my writing life, I’m sort of seeing it as all about the power of writing. starting a new piece is all about embarking on a new life on the page. And, should publication follow, then that’s a whole other ‘new life’ right there, a new life in print. a new life in the world of literature.

I think that stuff makes more sense in my head perhaps than how the last paragraph just explained it (or failed to). Fact is, that bit in the video where the  dancing ladies in the purple fedoras appear, that bursting, glowing, pumping bit of the song, that’s kind of what it feels like in my head when I write something that I know is working. My brain fizzes to a beat like that. It only happens rarely, but it’s the kind of feeling that keeps me writing, even through those days when the writing clunks and thunks and refuses to sparkle.

If ‘A New Life’ floats your boat, I’d recommend grabbing the album Regions of Light and Sound of God. It’s partly inspired by Lynd Ward’s novel in woodcuts, Gods’ Man, the awesomeness of which requires a whole other post.

GodsMan

Anyone out there heard a new song that just refuses to let them go?

Inspiring stuff

Busy reading and editing and writing at the moment, inspired by the following:

Efterklang’s new album, Piramida:

From the Youtube page:

The making of Efterklang´s new album started out in unusual fashion in August 2011, when the members of Efterklang (Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg) went on a nine-day audio expedition to an abandoned Russian settlement in Spitsbergen, an Arctic island located just shy of the North Pole. Spitsbergen is home to more polar bears than people and also to the ghost town of Piramida, which was abandoned overnight in 1998, and today stands as a slowly decaying ruin still full of physical memories like the world´s northernmost piano.

As you can see from this performance of The Ghost it’s a rather special album.

The short stories of Swedish author Stig Dagerman, whose collection The Games of Night I am taking my time over (inbetween mammoth novel reading sessions for my MA):

My writing and editing is being fueled by the new sampler from Hawk Moon Records, a free download by the name of Hawk Moon Records, Volume III.

From the website:

For our third Hawk Moon compilation, we charged a small band of selected artists with the brief of creating ‘music to sleep to’. If you look right back to the very roots of ambient and drone music, this idea is something that’s been explored many times over the years. Not striving for mere cliché, we wanted to give a current crop of artists the chance to express themselves with this oft-explored theme. We wondered what new techniques and textures might crop up and if our chosen few would draw influence from sounds explored previously for this conceptual venture…….the sound is drawn out to allow the subtle nuances of a drone to develop and activate the subconscious; an ideal state of mind for drifting off to sleep.

As well as being excellent sleeping music, it makes top draw writing music. Well worth a download.

From the MA reading list I have so far been disappointed by Everything is Illuminated and Going Out, but Will Self’s Dorian is proving great fun. Nice to finally be reading something wholly engaging.

Other than that, Happy Camper’s ‘Made To Be’ wanting is the latest track to get my story cogs turning, chewing up stuff ready to tackle round two of my MA novel:

What’s inspiring you at the moment?

100RPM out now!

Today sees the publication of 100RPM. It’s a charity collection of 100 stories of 100 words in length all inspired by songs. It’s being sold for the bargain price of 99p for the next week, just over a third of which will go to the charity One in Four. When the price goes up in a week’s time, even more more money will go to the charity. It’s all the doing of the brilliant and talented author Caroline Smailes and she explains the whole endeavour far better than I do over on her blog today.

Did I mention the book contains a foreward by THE Nik Kershaw? The real one, not as my wife thought when I told her, some bloke who just happens to have the same name.

And isn’t the cover awesome:

The book is available from Amazon right now, and can be read on PC, Mac, iPod touch, iPhone, handset via the handy Kindle apps for those devices, and of course on the Kindle itself.

Buy 100 RPM from Amazon.

There’s also a 100RPM Facebook page which you can support by liking.

And you can listen to the 100 songs that inspired the 100 stories by checking out the 100 RPM Youtube playlist.

Oh and it contains 100 stories from a whole host of short short fiction authors who selected a song and then wrote a story inspired by that song. Two of the stories in there are mine.

My story ‘in media res’ was inspired by the song of the same name by Los Campesinos:

My other story, ‘This Tornado Love’ was inspired by This Tornado Loves You by Neko Case:

Both are top tunes and I hope my stories do them justice. But I hope even more that those of you reading this will head over to Amazon and support this book. It really is rather special.

That link again: Buy 100RPM!

Home

After 13 hours on road and sea yesterday, I am finally home. Had a great week but great to be home. Like this great:

Will post soon about the week’s workshops and writing and the like. Right now though, enjoying being back with my family. See you in a bit.