Tag Archives: writing music

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?

Subs call for charity anthology

The brilliant Caroline Smailes has made a submissions call for an ebook charity anthology she is putting together, proceeds to go to One in Four.

The idea is this:

  • Write a story or a flash of a moment based on, linked to or inspired by a song on YouTube.
  • It MUST be 100 words or fewer.
  • No song (for copyright reasons) lyrics should be included in the story.
  • Deadline is Wednesday 11 January (GMT).
  • Writers MUST hold the copyright to their stories and the stories MUST NOT have been published elsewhere.

You can read the full details over on Caroline’s blog. She is also asking for ideas for the title of the collection.

Sounds like a very worthwhile and exciting collection. I have a piece in the works that I will be polishing and subbing just as soon as I post off my first MA essay, deadline tomorrow. Got my song picked out and a rough draft down, after inspiration struck yesterday while in the shower.

Good luck!

Top 5 Writing Music Albums of 2011

Regular readers will already known that music plays an important part in my writing process. This year has seen a bumper crop of new albums finding their way onto my Writing playlist to loop while I scribble, scrabble and tap my first drafts into notebooks both analogue and digital, both actual and virtual. As there were so many, I’ve given them their own wee chart, separate from my other album choices. These are my favourite pieces of music to write to released this year:

five

IOTB Vol 1

Industries of the Blind – Chapter 1: Had We Known Better

Industries of the Blind is a nine piece instrumental post-rock ensemble with a rousing ambient sound. They are currently offering their first three-track EP Chapter 1: Had We Known Better for free on their website. It’s well worth a download, and a donation if you like what you hear.

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EITS Take Care

Explosions in the Sky – Take Care, Take Care

Explosions in the Sky have long been my go-to-band for writing sessions and their latest collection of instrumental brilliance has soundtracked the first draft writing of at least two short stories this year.

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three

Bill Ryder-Jones – If

If is a musical adaptation of Italo Calvino‘s 1979 novel If on a Winters Night a Traveler. A surprisingly leftfield move by the former guitarist of The Coral, but one my writing self is very grateful for. Atmospheric and moving, this has not only helped me draft my Willesden Herald Short Story Competition entry but also has pushed the novel up to the top of my reading pile.

Unfortunately there are no If videos on Youtube to share with you. Shame.

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Ólafur Arnalds – Living Room Songs

Icelandic contemporary composer Ólafur Arnalds created and released a new song, one per day for a whole week during the month of October 2011. The songs were recorded and filmed live in the living room of his Reykjavik apartment and released instantly for free as streamed videos and mp3 downloads. You can check out the tracks and videos here.

I’m not the only writer inspired by Arnalds’ emotive music. Andy Harrod produced seven flash fictions inspired by Living Room Songs, one for each track of the album. The initial print run of the Handmade Edition is sold out, but Andy will be releasing a second print run soon. I’ll be reviewing Living Room Stories here in the new year.

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AWVFTS

A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen

On May 24th 2007, in Bologna, Italy, Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie & Dustin O’Halloran embarked upon a curious friendship while Adam was on tour and playing with the late Mark Linkous & his beloved Sparklehorse, on what would be their final european tour. That night, through a strange twist of backstage conversations surrounding passport cache conundrums, and love of italian gastronomy. The  offspring spawned from this friendship is this collection of harmonic robitussinal compositions for the world to savour. And I for one am very glad of its existence.

This album has received more play than any of the others during my writing sessions. Like four times as many plays according to my iTunes meta-data. It’s the perfect balance of ambient and emotive. I can’t see myself getting bored of it any time soon. It’s too beautiful.

Rising and editing.

Finished the edits of two stories today, one a revamp from a while back for re-subbing to some lit journals, the other something new for the Fish Short Story Prize which closes tomorrow and will be judged by the real David Mitchell (the author that is, not the star of Peep Show). I’ve been listening to a lot of writing music while prepping these, most notably A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Bill Ryder-Jones’ If. My Fish Prize story was heavily edited while listening to Lhasa de Sela’s excellent eponymous album from 2009, particularly this track:

Here’s hoping my story has a sliver of the emotion of this rather beautiful song.

In other news, I’m coming to the end of my first MA unit and feeling reflective so will be posting a couple of posts about that soon; the first about the recent proliferation of blog posts about the merit of Creative Writing courses (I know ……a post about other posts, how pathetically post-modern (see what I did there?)) the other about my specific experience spending a term reading and picking apart ten novels in ten weeks along with my rather brilliant online seminar group.

Also, probably best to expect at least a few best of 2011 posts from me sometime soon. Again, sad I know, but necessary.

Living Room Songs

Tripped over this while browsing the interweb this morning with a cuppa. It’s bloody lovely:
Living Room Songs by Ólafur Arnalds

Ólafur Arnalds creates and releases a new song, one per day for one whole week. The songs will be recorded and filmed live in the living room of his Reykjavík apartment and released instantly for FREE as streamed videos and MP3 downloads.

Following in the spirit of Ólafur Arnalds’ critically acclaimed ‘Found Songs’ (2009) where he wrote, recorded and released a free song every day for a week – now comes ‘Living Room Songs’. This time Ólafur takes the idea further and invites the audience into the comfort of his living room, where the songs will be recorded live and the whole process filmed. The songs will instantly be released in form of free MP3 downloads and videos to stream – straight from Ólafur’s Reykjavík apartment.

‘Living Room Songs’ will also receive a physical release (CD/Vinyl/High Quality Digital Version as well as Special Edition CD & DVD) before the year is out. You can already pre-order it from the Erased Tapes online store.

As someone who recorded tracks in a bandmate’s living room on an old school eight-track back in the days I sang and played guitar this struck a chord (pun intended) with me. Safe to say I’ve found my next lot of writing music. I bought the higher quality digital copy of Found Songs on iTunes as supporting this kind of endeavour is important. I’ll be buying a copy of Living Room songs once available too.

(via @meandmybigmouth)