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Illustrating the story – 1

December 26, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“Album covers are like any other vehicle, they are a means of illustrating a story”.

Peter Blake

The fabulous cover for our new CD – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” was created for us by Toronto-based musician and artist – Martin Springett.

That we ended up with such an excellent and fitting cover is entirely down to the Chanteuse. She describes how it came about:

“How I was connected with Martin is through a friend and work colleague of my husband’s named Joan Steacy.  Joan is an award-winning graphic novelist and instructor at Camosun College’s Comic and Graphic Arts program.  Joan was over one day and I had her listen to a track from the new ‘Anam Danu’ album.  She said the music reminded her of her friend Martin’s music, and then she explained that he was also fabulous graphic artist who had done album covers for his band, and other bands, as well as being a children’s book illustrator“.

The Chanteuse investigated Martin’s website and found that the style of his artwork fitted with thoughts that she already had in mind for the CD cover. Joan put the Chanteuse in touch with Martin – she called him and introduced us and asked if he might be prepared to take on a commission for us. Having listened to some of the tracks from our first release – “Winds of Change” – Martin most kindly and generously agreed to take on the project.

Martin and the Chanteuse engaged in an email exchange to determine the elements that the cover should include. Martin sent her examples of previous works in similar styles to those that they were discussing and the Chanteuse sent him images of Celtic designs that she had sourced.

Common ground having been agreed upon, Martin quickly came up with some initial ideas as to the form that the cover might eventually take. These lovely drawings show how it rapidly evolved. (Note that we had clearly at that point not settled on a final title for the album!).

 

 

 

Martin wrote of making the figure “more lively“; of creating “a big gesture that would flow across the square shape“. This is what he came up with:

 

We loved it and immediately gave it the thumbs up. We loved the flow and movement of the Goddess herself – we loved the elements of the circle of life that have been incorporated and we loved the way that Martin had pulled into the image ideas and themes that we had addressed in the songs on the album.

We eagerly anticipating seeing the finished cover. The process by which Martin turned his draft into the finished artwork will be the subject of my next post.

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Flying the nest

December 21, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Artwork by Martin SpringettSince my last update on the subject of the eagerly awaited new Anam Danu album – “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – much has occurred.

The tracks have passed through the mastering process described in my last update and have been assembled into an album. Final tweaks were made and all is now as good as we can get it.

We now have a splendid and beautiful cover for the CD – the which you can see at the top of this post. This lovely piece of work was created specially for us and I will pass on the full story of how it came to be in a subsequent post.

All of this goodness has been bundled up in the approved fashion and shipped off to our Digital Music Distributor of choice. All we can do now is to sit back and wait, because the process normally takes around three to four weeks. With Christmas looming it may even take a little longer – but as you all know: “All good things…”

Once all has been through the approval mill the album will become available through all the usual digital channels.

Finally – Anam Danu now has its own website, which can be found at:

Anamdanu.com

We are pretty pleased with the way that the website has turned out, but is is conspicuously lacking in any of the usual atmospheric band shots. The reasons for that are sadly obvious; in times of pandemic trying to organise a photo shoot runs that gamut from difficult to downright foolhardy.

The website will be kept up to date with all manner of musical goings-on as things progress. Needless to say one of the first things to look for there will be the firm release dates – once we know them – as well as details as to where to find the album.

The music on this album was very much born out of this most unfortunate year. Our hope is that in this manner (as of course in many others) something good will come from it.

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The Lark Ascending

December 13, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

My tastes in music are distinctly catholic; the same being true of both popular and classical repertoires. With regard to the latter I must admit to being a romantic (actually probably true in many spheres) – the which never quite sat right with more formal classicists like my father whose interests tended toward the mathematical rather than the emotional.

I make no apologies for that…

I have a particular passion for the composers of what might be considered the golden age of British music (contentious, I know – but not the main drift of this post) – the music of Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams all being dear to my heart. Given the relatively low esteem in which English composers are held in general by comparison with the greats of classical music I sometimes wonder just what it is about this music which touches my soul in ways that, say, Mozart and Beethoven – for all their acknowledged genius – do not.

Is there some musical chauvinism at work or could it really be that there is something in the music that captures an essence of (at least part of) the country and of its peoples?

I am – of course – far from alone in my appreciation for these works. The long running British radio program – ‘Desert Island Discs‘ – for which (often celebrity) guests choose the eight recordings with which they would care to be marooned on the fictive island of the title, noted that Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending‘ was one of the most frequently chosen pieces. Indeed – when the program ran a poll of its audience’s all time favourite recordings, ‘The Lark…’ came out on top.

The reason for my musing on this subject in the midst of a British Columbian winter is that I re-watched the other day a short BBC documentary from 2012 – hosted by the late Dame Dianna Rigg – on the subject of ‘The Lark…‘.

Vaughan Williams started work on the piece in 1914 just before the outbreak of the Great War, inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name. In the hiatus that ensued Vaughan Williams (who was 41 at the time) served as an ambulance driver in France and Salonika. After the war he re-visited ‘The Lark…‘ with the help of the English violinist, Marie Hall, to whom the piece is dedicated. The original version of the work – scored for solo violin and piano – was premiered in December of 1920 in conjunction with the Avonmouth and Shirehampton Choral Society, at Shirehampton Public Hall, not far from Bristol.

The main feature of the 2012 documentary was a re-creation of that first performance of ‘The Lark…‘ at Shirehampton Public Hall, with the young violin virtuoso, Julia Hwang, in the staring role. The audience comprised mainly good folk of what we might call ‘a certain age’ and as the piece progressed the camera lingered on individual faces so that the viewer might best measure the effect the the work has on those with familiar sensibilities. The audience did not disappoint and no British stiff-upper-lip could disguise their emotional response to the piece.

What struck me most was that at the time of the recording, Julia Hwang was a mere fifteen years old. How could one so young give a performance with such intense detail; laden with emotions of which she must a that age surely have been innocent?

Therein – I would humbly suggest – lies the formidable power of music…

 

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Missing out

November 28, 2020 in Life in BC | Permalink

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

Jonathan Lethem – ‘The Fortress of Solitude’

We are – when all is said and done – having a good pandemic!

Now, should the gentle reader take offence at my flippancy (a fair call one might say) consider that – compared to those who have lost loved ones – to those who have themselves been ill – to those who have lost their livelihoods – to those, even, who have had to endure lock-down separated from family or in cramped and unsuitable quarters… we are undoubtedly blessed a thousand times over.

I hope that you will forgive me for wishing that, for us, it will remain that way. I truly wish that all were similarly blessed.

Even so…

It is difficult to look back at the autumns (falls) of previous years without a certain wistfulness adding itself to my habitual autumnal melancholia. Since The Girl and I found our way to these shores more than half a decade ago we have noted that Canadians (well, Victorians certainly) are in the habit of leavening the often dreary run in to the festive season by means of a variety of diversions and entertainments. We have – quite naturally – happily joined in.

Looking back over the past five years of autumnal blog entries I can see that music has featured strongly: Our annual rendezvous with Barney Bentall’s Cariboo Express has become almost a tradition and the season has also featured other regular charity concerts, such as those supported by Victoria’s ‘New Orleans inspired Funk Brouhaha‘ outfit The Hi Fi. The last few years have also seen one or more of us in attendance at gigs by artists such as Simple Minds, Cowboy Junkies and Skerryvore.

Theatre has also featured strongly. The Belfry usually starts its new season in the fall with us in anxious attendance, hoping for signs that this season will be a ‘doozy’ and that – come springtime – we will not be feeling faintly dissatisfied (as we occasionally do) with the fare on offer. Now is also the time of year that Intrepid Theatre normally goes into full-on fund-raising mode, with its annual ‘Merry & Bright‘ event at The Atrium downtown.

Not this year – of course…

I see also from my retrospective perusing that we have on more than one occasion enjoyed a trip to Vancouver during this season – often with some Rugby involvement. We had tickets this year for the Rugby Canada Halloween Event at BC Place in Vancouver which would have featured Canada, the USA, Fiji and an All Black XV. We had even booked our hotel!

We still have on our mantle a slightly sorry stack of tickets for various events – all of which have been postponed and will (hopefully) be rescheduled when it is safe so to do. But for now…

Sigh!!

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A sweeter sound

November 25, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“Recording studios are interesting; a lot of people say – and I agree – that you should have a lot of wood in a recording studio. It gets a kind of a sweeter sound”.

Paul Allen

I find that I am spending a great deal of time in my little studio these days. There is the music – of course; we are very busy trying to get our album finished and out into the world. I also use the studio for my teaching (and the preparation thereof) – which is all done over the Internet at the moment for COVID-19 reasons. To accommodate these multiple tasks the studio has slowly evolved since the days when it was first set up back in 2016 and I posted the first pictures of it to this forum.

This is what it used to look like:

And this is how it is now:

Nice new rug, don’t you think?

Now – you might think that having three screens is simply overkill. When I’m teaching, however, the conferencing/chat software that we use runs on the centre screen – the presentation (or any other resource) that I am teaching from runs on the left one and the third one is used for looking ahead in the materials, for trying things out or checking details in answer to student queries that come up during the class. A lot of multi-tasking goes on! During Lab sessions this third screen runs a remote desktop session on an machine in one of the College’s computer labs so that I can assist any students who are working there.

It is quite a juggling act – and towards the end of term it all gets pretty tiring.

Roll on Christmas, say I…

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His Master’s Voice

November 19, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

My last update on the topic of the new music shortly to appear from Anam Danu (my now two year collaboration with The Chanteuse) hit the streets (ie – appeared on this blog) about a month ago now. We had – at the time – just sent out copies of all of the tracks in our burgeoning collection to a small number of trusted individuals with the request that they give us their unvarnished opinions thereof.

This they duly did – and lessons were learned!

As a result – and after a certain amount of horse-trading – we ended up with a mutually acceptable running order. Final mixes followed rapidly, exported as 24 bit WAV files (that is in decently high quality versions) and the package completed with a guide MP3 file of the whole album with timed inter-track gaps, fades and suchlike. Accompanied by the necessary documentation – band name, album title, track names and numbers, track times and ISRC numbers for each track – everything was transferred to our chosen mastering company (CPS Mastering of Vancouver) and left in the care of the estimable Brock McFarlane.

Now – for those who have no idea what audio mastering entails, Wikipedia has this helpful explanation:

“Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication).

One of the key reasons for getting your mastering done professionally is that – being effected in a suitable acoustically-neutral mastering environment –  the end result can be guaranteed to play successfully on pretty much all systems and in all spaces.

Yesterday we received from CPS the first mastered draft of the whole collection. We must now spend much time listening to it on different devices and in different environments to figure out if anything needs tweaking or whether we are good to go.

Then we just need to wait for album artwork (that’s another story!) and the whole can be dispatched to our chosen digital distributor to be sent to the various streaming/digital music providers – and CDs burned as required.

I will – of course – keep you informed of (inevitably slow) progress…

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Out for review

October 22, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”

Samuel Johnson

In my post to this journal of July 17th – ‘Closer than you think‘ – I described how the Chanteuse and I had contrived – in spite of all difficulties arising from the COVID-19 pandemic lock-down – to start remotely recording her vocals onto a set of ten tracks that I had prepared – and which we hoped to turn into a new Anam Danu album in due course.

My last update on the matter came at the end of a post of August 25th entitled ‘Busy, busy, busy‘ – the which was primarily (unsurprisingly) concerned with just how busy we were… it being ‘that time of year’!

Well – these things do indeed take time – but I feel that an update is due.

We have finished recording the vocals and the tracks are essentially complete. That does not mean that they are ready to be sent out into the world. I have been doing much in the way of post-processing and making initial and intermediate mixes. The next stage is to finalise the mixes, to decide on the sequencing and to send the tracks off to a professional Mastering Engineer to get them ‘mastered’ ready for submission to whichever online distribution company we choose to go with. Much more on that stage of the process later.

There is – however – one more thing to be done before we send our tracks for mastering… and that is to get feedback on them from some trusted and interested parties. That is where we are at right now – and I can tell you that it is a nerve-racking process. Having spent many months in very close proximity to these creations as they have evolved we must now stand back from them and ask others to give us – in their own time – their opinions on our endeavours.

Not much makes me nervous. This – however – does!

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Busy, busy, busy

August 25, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

There is no Victoria Fringe Festival this year, for reasons which will require no further elucidation. Indeed, fringe festivals are – in this exceedingly difficult time – exceedingly thin on the ground.

In common, no doubt, with other similar organising companies Intrepid Theatre juggled for a while notions of alternative festival forms (online only – local companies in carefully socially isolated venues…) but in the end had to admit defeat. One of the major problems is that many small fringe companies can only make their festival visits work financially if they can hop from one such to another, filling their summers with a brief international tour of fringes. Economies of scale – dontcha know…

Well – no-one is doing international fringe tours this year – so that all went out of the window. Intrepid – like many small companies heavily reliant on grant income – is having to work hard just to survive, without taking on further major challenges. Kudos to them – say I – for keeping the ship afloat.

So – the gentle reader will doubtless be musing – at a time of year when things are normally pretty frenetic, the Immigrant must be able to kick-back and enjoy the dog days sitting on the deck, chilled white in hand, enjoying the late August sunshine.

Not a bit of it! I am busier than ever and cannot frankly imagine how my fringe duties might have been fitted in at all.

The chief source of such busyness is my rapidly upcoming computer literacy teaching. Term starts in a couple of weeks and, because the course is being taught entirely online, all of the course structures and materials must be re-designed and re-written accordingly. It is one thing in normal times for students to slumber gently for ninety minutes in a lecture theatre whilst I drone on about the good-old days of computing (after all, when I am done they can all head off to the cafeteria for cheap sustenance and the chance to ‘diss’ my efforts) but quite another being taught online. In the comforts (or otherwise) of their own homes not a one of them would put up with an hour and a half of a disembodied voice emanating from the equivalent of a Zoom session. They would more likely just go back to bed and do what students do best.

No – the canny lecturer just has to get a whole bunch more canny than ever in order to keep them engaged. I will report back as to how it all goes.

My other busyness is much more fun. Since The Chanteuse and I discovered how to record with each other safely at arms-length we have been rampaging our way through our back-catalog of as-yet unrecorded tracks – trying to complete them before she too has to go back to work in September. Though I say it myself, we have been doing some great work. There is much to do on the mixing and mastering fronts – not to mention all the other bits and pieces that go to make up a release – but we have an album’s worth of material and we aim to get something out into the big wide world this autumn.

Now – that is exciting! 

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You win some…

August 8, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

…you lose some!

My last posting celebrated our recent tenth anniversary dinner at the Deep Cove Chalet at the top end of the Saanich peninsula. Though obviously meaningful in its own right this event carried an extra significance in that it was our first meal out at a restaurant since the COVID-19 lock-down took effect in mid-March. We have somewhat lost the habit of dining out and it felt slightly surreal to be doing so again. We were glad in the circumstances that we got to dine outside on the terrace; we are still not sure how we feel about repeating the experience indoors.

In any case the evening started me thinking about all of those good things that have been lost to us all in this peculiar summer as a result of the pandemic. I am not in this instance referring to those who have tragically lost loved ones, friends or colleagues (or even of those who have themselves been ill) – our hearts go out to them all and those that we know are very much in our thoughts.

No – in this case I am thinking of the everyday things that have disappeared or been put on indefinite hold and have as such left a hole in our lives. In addition to dining out and gathering together with friends we very much miss going to the theatre and the loss of the live music scene is keenly felt; at this time of the year we would normally be enjoying the weekly music in the park series in nearby Brentwood Bay.

Travel is not so much missed – the thought of flying at the moment gives me the shivers – but the pleasures of planning the next trip are. I do, of course, also miss live sport. International cricket has recently resumed in the UK – played in empty grounds and with the players essentially quarantined for the duration of the series. Rugby has yet to restart and is sorely missed. We have still not yet seen the end of the Six Nations tournament that was so abruptly truncated in March.

As is my nature I also fell to wondering if any positives could be identified from this much disrupted period. I believe that there are. Not having to commute to work is a definite plus, as is being able to spend more time at home. We are fortunate in that we have not – as have some – gone stir-crazy as a result of a paucity of things to do. We have both been busy, busy, busy… (in my case this includes the writing of many new songs and the re-writing much of my course material for the autumn).

Some people’s gardens have had more attention than they have had for a good long while and one of my great joys has been just how much more time we have spent entertaining in our garden (in a suitably socially distanced manner, of course). In some years this wonderful garden does not seem to get enough use – what with one thing and another. This year has more than made up for any previous lack.

Of course, we have not yet arrived at the hardest part of the lock-down. At the start of it we were all in a state of some shock and just wanted to hunker down and stay out of trouble. By the time we started getting really restless again the summer was upon us and there we pleasant diversions – even if only just outside our doors. Now we are heading rapidly towards the autumn and the winter – with no relief currently in sight.

I fear that it is going to be a long, hard winter…

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Closer than you think

July 17, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“The stars up there at night are closer than you think.”

Doug Dillon

‘Twas but a mere handful of posts back that I was bemoaning the sad fact that the Chanteuse and I had been unable to get on with recording the seemingly endless (hopefully!) sequence of songs that I am clearly engaged upon writing at the moment. The latest in a line of tragic circumstances (in this case one that affects everyone – the COVID-19 pandemic!) had put a stop to any prospects of two non-isolation-group souls singing with each other – thus rendering recording impossible…

…unless we could come up with some means of so doing that did not require us to be in the same room (or even the same building)! Well – clearly other people are doing just such things, so it must be possible. Indeed there is a plethora of different technical solutions to the problem, but at first glance nothing that met our preferred and exacting requirements.

What we really wanted to be able to do was to record the Chanteuse’s voice exactly the way that we normally do – with the exception of each being in our own homes rather than together in my little studio. This would involve my playing the track from my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) – the Chanteuse listening to it on headphones and singing the vocal part along with it – and my recording the resultant performance back into the DAW. I would then need to be able to play the ‘completed’ track back so that we could both listen critically to it.

Clearly the best way to effect such a seemingly complex technical trick – given that we don’t have the budget of an international broadcaster or major telecommunications company – was to use the InterWebNet. But how might that even be possible?

Well, the solution that I eventually found – after trying just about every alternative that we could reasonably afford – comes from a German company and is called SessionLinkPRO. It is a web application that works – joy of joy – using just Google’s Chrome web browser and has a splendidly simple but effective interface that enables two computers – one running the DAW software and the other equipped with an audio interface and studio microphone – to send and receive simultaneous digital audio streams at studio quality. Sweet!

We had our first online recording session this week, finishing off a track that we had started recording back at the beginning of March. Though SessionLinkPRO also offer video links if required we chose to work simply with audio and we were naturally a little worried at first that not being able to see each other – and the inevitable slight audio delay in the round-trip signal – might make the session awkward. We were, however, rapidly into our stride and in discussion afterwards decided that – since we don’t really look at each other whilst working anyway –  the task at hand was no more taxing than it normally is.

The proof of the pudding is that – having done the first mixes of the track concerned – it is virtually impossible to tell that different parts of the vocal were recorded at different times and in entirely different circumstances.

Kudos again to SessionLinkPRO – and should any gentle reader be interested in the technical details of the setup I would be happy to furnish them.

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