Dooooooh Doo Doo Dooooh

I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with young people over the last couple of years. This mostly involves introducing them to new ways of making and thinking about music. I have continued to do this work during my sabbatical as I hope it might go some way towards creating a more enriched future.

The latest event I attended was the “Change Day” held at Billesley Primary School in Birmingham. I spent between 45 minutes and an hour with groups of 15 kids, showing them how sampling and looping works and then writing a short tune using this technique to form the basis. Given the short period of time available I was really pleased with the results. As well as creating the rhythm and the “bassline” the kids also wrote and sang the lyrics.

Here is the catchy ditty year 6 created:

[audio:https://www.mrunderwood.co.uk/audio/Yr6_I_Want_My_School_To_Be.mp3]

I would like to thank everyone involved for helping make this inspiring day happen. The other creative practitioners were really great and I think the goals of the day were exceeded.

Grand Design

We moved to the sticks about 18 months ago. When we bought our house we knew it was too small and we always planned to expand it. I work from home, in a small spare bedroom and I have a music room (you can hardly call it a studio) in the other small spare bedroom. My girlfriend suggests I’m a volatile gas, expanding to fill any space provided. She’s right!

We decided to have a purpose built office & studio built. This is where it’s up to:

Unfortunately, things have done what they always do on TV and spiralled. It’s hard; you can’t exactly stop mid build. This silly building has more than wiped out our savings and has made me rather twitchy, especially given some life decisions I have made over the last year or so.

On the plus side, it will get finished and it will be a major asset. It consists of a double garage / workshop, a soundproofed studio (with booth etc.) and a design studio / office apartment. How coooool is that? I so look forward to my first ever purpose built space for music making. BRING IT!

Supersonic Sam

With my workshop and midi-octopus performance at the British Science Festival complete I thought I’d update you on what’s next >> Supersonic!

Yep, it’s official, Supersonic 2010 will see me rushing around like a fookin mad man!

Saturday kicks off with me doing Big Sounds for Little People at the mac. Then I will be rushing over to VIVID to run a workshop to build Supersonic Noise Boxes on the Saturday afternoon. Then a brief rest before playing tuba in a gimp mask on the Saturday evening as part of the Lash Frenzy Big Band (with KK NULL). Finally, on the Sunday I will be performing a specially adapted version of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music, for four Supersonic Noise Boxes and four torches.

That is a pretty full-on schedule and one I am very proud to have been asked to deliver! Nietzsche would agree that if it doesn’t kill me it will certainly be very cool ;)

Thanks to Andrew Moscardo-Parker for offering me a part in the Lash Frenzy Big Band, Richard Hawley and his friend who owns a tuba for sorting me out with that, and of course Capsule for allowing me to do all this wicked stuff.

Before all this kicks off though, I am going on HOLIDAY!! See you on the other side.