Outside the Box panel at UnConvention in Manchester

Outside the Box panel
Steve, Amran, Abi, Stef & Caro in a church hall in Salford

This is the audio recording of the panel session I chaired at Un-Convention in Manchester last month. It was about music that falls outside the indie rock band tradition you’d normally expect represented at these sorts of events. I wanted to know if there were any lessons that could be drawn from outside the margins.

Some really amazing and insightful stuff from Stef Lewandowski, Steve Lawson, Amran Ellahi, Abigail Seabrook, and Caroline Churchill.

You can listen to all of the panel sessions at the Un-Convention Soundcloud page.

Qualified to tell you to go and read books

PhbooksD

I’m now officially allowed to be your PhD supervisor.

I did a three-day training course run by the university on Friday last week, Tuesday and Wednesday this week – and having come out the other side of that, we’re all systems go.

What’s your theoretical framework?

My first two doctoral students turn up in September, and it looks like the vast majority of my teaching from here on out is going to be post-graduate stuff. After a decade of teaching mostly undergrads, this is going to be an interesting change – though, that said, I have taught Masters programmes in the past… and there are certain topics I will still inevitably be called upon to lecture in for the BA students.

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Advice for Young Mothers-to-be

JakeThe title of this post is borrowed from a song by The Veils and it’s kind of in response to all of the people I know who are having children right now. It’s pretty much an epidemic. Everyone seems either about to have a baby, to have recently had a baby, or just found out they’re pregnant.

Of course, we were into that particular fad before any of you guys – and now Jake, at 16, has finished his GCSEs. That’s a picture of him, taken yesterday at his high school prom. And yes, he’s the only person in this family who owns a suit.

He’s just been accepted into CTC Kingshurst Academy – a 6th form college, where he is going to start doing the International Baccalaureate – a relief, since Solihull 6th Form College decided to drop the programme after he’d been accepted there.

He’s spending his holidays so far doing a bit of graphic design, some (paid) sound engineering work, a spot of skateboarding, staying up and making up for lost time on all of those computer games he wasn’t able to play in the lead-up to his exams, a spot of drum practice and some full-on chilling out with his girlfriend Hannah, and his best friend Ethan.

So this is just to say – to members of my family and the many of my friends (including some yet to make their news public) – if you’re going through the early stages, the doctor’s appointments, the morning sickness, the colic, the lost sleep, the midnight feeds and the constant full-attention responsibility for something so fragile (and, of course, so cute), then enjoy it, remember that it doesn’t last forever, and in the end – if you’re lucky – they turn out like this.

Jake’s awesome – intelligent, interesting, creative and funny – and we’re really proud of him.

Back in Birmingham

Boat trip
Boat trip from Genoa to Camogli

As expected, I had a great time in Italy. I was busy pretty much the whole time, but I did make sure that I got to see a bit of the city, hang out with some great people and do some interesting things.

I was in Genoa with Stef working on the Aftershock Project – a collaboration between composer Nitin Sawhney and about a dozen musicians from across Europe who had never met. Over the course of the week, they wrote and rehearsed an hours worth of new music for a one-off performance in the little fishing village of Camogli.

Stef’s job was to build them a website, and he brought me in because I’m the ‘online music’ guy. Our idea was rather than simply build an online brochure, we would tell the story of the collaboration as it happened. Instead of making a website about Aftershock, we put Aftershock online.

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Aftershock Genoa

Aftershock musicians
The Aftershock musicians on a lunchbreak

I wish there’d been time to blog what I’ve been doing over the past few days, but I’ve been so busy doing it that the opportunity just never presented itself.

My friend Stef and I are working on a project in Italy called Aftershock. It’s a collaboration between musicians from across Europe, led by Nitin Sawhney and culminating in a major concert event on Friday night. The musicians meet (mostly for the first time ever), and then compose a whole set of new pieces over 5 days.

There’s a real mix – vocalists, a drummer & beatboxer, a harpist, a percussionist, guitarist & bass-player, trumpeter… and Nitin leading the group, conducting workshops and overseeing the whole project. People from the UK, Italy, France and elsewhere. It’s quite an amazing and unique event.

Stef and I are building the website. Which is to say – Stef’s building the website.

What I do is less concrete but seemingly no less intensive. But the reason we’re actually in Genoa doing it is because it’s not just a website about Aftershock, it’s the Aftershock project itself put online.

That may not sound like a major difference – but where most events would be likely to have a website that is effectively an electronic brochure focused on promoting the event, we are more concerned with the underlying story: the creative process that takes place in the lead-up to the event, the characters of the musicians themselves, and the progress from the blank page to a full concert worth of music.

The people are amazing and very individual – there are some really strong characters, and lots of really amazing stuff going on. So what we’ve done is to give all 12 musicians a handheld video camera and told them to film whatever they thought was interesting. In a way, it’s like a reality show where the contestants get the cameras.

What’s great and interesting about that is that it allows the public to see into the development of the works, get to know the people involved, care about the characters and want to know the ‘end’ of the story – which is to say, come to the concert.

In other words, I’m approaching this as storytelling, rather than as marketing.

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