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Forthcoming Events : Last updated 24-Jan-12

24-Jan-12: BBC Star Gazing Live / Telescopes for Ethiopia Appeal

Cutting / PDF from the Sunderland Echo describing the Telescopes for Ethiopia project launched by Sunderland Astronomical Society.

03-Nov-11: Generations

The Generations concert is back on the schedule again. This makes me very happy.

18-Oct-11: Radio Go-Go

A couple of months ago, I entered into some intriguing discussions with a local radio station, who asked if I would be interested in producing a radio show of my own. I put together a collection of ideas and a remit, then submitted the plan. The station liked what they read and agreed to discuss the programme with their commissioning team. Further meetings followed, all of which were very positive and very productive.

However, progress stalled and, despite numerous gentle reminders, we're still no further forward. Last night, I withdrew from the plan because I have other projects that I need to focus on and this one clearly wasn't going anywhere fast.

I'd like to thank all of those kind and wonderful people who offered support and encouragement, and to those legion of folk who agreed to come on the show as guests.

The show may emerge in one form or another on a rival station though no time frame is available at the moment, as cutbacks are still biting deep in the broadcasting world.

One to watch.

15-Oct-11: Recent Events II

Thursday night's book launch at Newcastle City Library was a very enjoyable affair. We were there to celebrate the launch of Alright Now!, a compilation of short stories about life in 1970's Newcastle and since I'm of an age when I can just about remember the 70's, I offered up a short story about an encounter with the disgraced politician and social architect, T. Dan Smith. The piece is about 500 words long and covers two pages.

The event was special because I finally got to meet Bobby Moncur, captain of Newcastle United in the late 60's and early 70's, plus Lindisfarne's Ray Laidlaw.

It felt good to be back in print again and, better still, it sorts out that nagging question of what to buy people for Christmas!

14-Oct-11: Recent Events

The talk for Houghton Feast was a massive disappointment. Just five people through the door.

Why the abject failure? First and foremost, the event was left out of the main brochure and so hardly anyone knew about it, or if they did, had enough warning. Sunderland City Council did advertise the event in the Sunderland Echo and we also went around Houghton sticking posters up in shops, the library, the art club and a couple of churches too.

Alas, this was to no avail. Only five people turned up on the evening and, whilst the gathering was small and intimate, I was very disappointed at the low turn out.

None of my friends and fellow Committee Members bothered to turn up and, to add insult to injury, I understand that the Psychic Evening at the Wild Boar Public House was very well attended. Clearly the good citizens of this fair town would rather be fleeced by a blatant conman peddling fraudulent nonsense than actually learn something factual.

So, that's it with Houghton as far as I am concerned. I can't wait to move back to Newcastle.

30-Sep-11: Changes

The talk for the Trefoil Guild has been bumped back to January 2012 because of a clash with a similar event featuring P. C. W. Davies at Newcastle University, and I'm not going up against him.

However, another event has been added for the same week. I'll be talking to Newcastle University's Sceptics Society on November 22nd 2011, with a heavier version of the same Science Friction talk.

21-Aug-11: Archives

Digging around in the studio last week, I discovered a couple of old demo tapes from circa 1992 and 1993. Whilst I'd not forgotten any of these undoubted gems - indeed, many of the stems went on to form the basis of The Infection of Time - I did bury them away for a reason. They're from a time when I really didn't know much about music and, whilst some would say that's still the case, they do feel very, very primitive. A lot of this has to do with the studio of the day which suffered from some truly dreadful monitoring problems plus I am fairly convinced that these pieces were mixed with an old Tandy/Realistic six track mixer, which had the audio fidelity of a wet cardboard box.

Anyway, the technical details are not important. They're excuses. What is important is that, to me at least, there are clear difference between the early tapes, say 1991, and the later tapes, recorded in 93/94. They show a clear progression, that I was making progress, developing as a musician and learning my chops. However, there are still yawning gaps. The gap between what I was trying to do in my head and what I actually managed to achieve is embarrassing, occasionally painful. The gap between my work and that of my peers and my betters is very, very obvious.

That said, I still felt that they were good enough to preserve on the new system and so made a digital copy of each track.

This is, I feel, one of the better tracks. It's called Mirage and kinda feels like it might have been written last week, during one of the Ion sessions.

Mirage by SkinMechanix

Enjoy.

15-Aug-11: NE1 Fm Interview

Last Friday (12-Aug-11), I was the special guest on NE1Fm's The Afternoon Special, which is hosted by Martin Deltrice. I was there to talk about, amongst other things, the Perseid meteor shower, my work as a STEM Ambassador and my adventures writing music for libraries etc.

The interview was a terrific success and it was so nice not to be rushed or hurried in anyway and, better still, not to be replaced or upstaged at the last minute by a football-related report. The entire programme is on-line for a limited time here :

http://www.martindeltrice.co.uk/audio/MartinDeltrice_NE1fm_12-08-11.mp3

If all goes well then you might hear a bit more from this particular corner. We have plans afoot and ideas moving slowly down the pipeline. More information will be made available when we have something concrete to report but, for the time being, watch this space.

Meanwhile, here's another edit from the forthcoming Ion album:

The Traveller's Tale Edit by SkinMechanix

07-Aug-11: The Adventures of a STEM Ambassador

As mentioned elsewhere, I joined the UK Government's STEM Ambassador Programme in December 2010. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics and STEM Ambassadors are invited to visits schools and colleges to talk about their specialist subjects which, in my case, is astronomy and astrophysics.

Today, three of us were invited to visit Whitburn Church of England School near Sunderland. Dr. Pete Edwards of Durham University delivered a fantastic talk on the possibility of extra-solar life, Graham Darke, Chairman of Sunderland Astronomical Society, took the school on an extended tour of the school grounds in an attempt to illustrate the true scale of our solar system and I was able to fuse both of my passions, Electronic Music and Space Science, in a talk about Space Music and the Sounds of Space.

After each session, the children were able to play on a couple of old synths (SCI Pro One, Roland JD800, ARP Odyssey), and those with an obvious aptitude for knob twiddling where invited back to a later session where I got to teach them the art of improvising. Then, finally, the kids gave a short performance in front of the whole school using the tricks and techniques they'd learned earlier in the day.

My thanks go to Whitburn C of E staff Richard Oren for arranging the sessions, Ray Rose for his help and support, and Tracey Gibson for much kindest and hospitality.

My thanks to Gemma, Jenny and Louise for making this so much fun.

Additional As you might imagine, I was feeling pretty good after this event. Ecstatic to be precise. But, alas, the karmic wheel continues to turn and turn and, as I was less than two hundred metres from the front door and fully laden with around six thousand pounds worth of studio equipment, the car's timing chain snagged and the vehicle came to an abrupt halt. Thankfully, there was a Good Samaritan nearby who was willing and able to tow me to our front door but the engine was almost completely destroyed and required a full (and expensive) rebuild before it was roadworthy again.

Karma. You've gotta love it.

06-Aug-11: Demo pieces

My attempts at resurrecting Infection Music are proving fruitful. Here are a couple of demo pieces that I released on the SoundCloud platform during the last two weeks. They feature the new sequencer, Project X, a Roland JD800 and a Yamaha RM1x boom box.

"Aeolian-force-to-scale-test" by Ion

"Blues02 - Improvisation" by Ion

"I've waited far too long" by Ion

05-Aug-11: General update / Ion's Facebook page

A fan left me a message on the Ion Facebook page earlier this week. It said "Minerva makes me cry...", which is a very touching, honest and heartfelt remark. In many ways, it's the reason why I wrote Minerva - the desire to communicate, at a very deep level, with another human being. That kind of response doesn't happen very often but when it does it certainly makes all of the effort worthwhile.

Something of another milestone today. We sold our seventieth broadcast license, and that feels pretty good. What began as an experiment three years ago has developed into a small business capable of sustaining itself. All I have to do is periodically upload some new pieces and we're off again. It's a fully viable alternative to selling CDs and, whilst I do miss selling discs, we have to accept that the glory days of flogging a boatload CDs are no longer with us.

Last year, I was accepted into the Guild of Northern Media Composers, which was set up in 2009 to provide makers of visual media with a 'one stop shop' for all of their music and audio needs. Our other objective is to band together and use our collective leverage to improve our lot as composers amongst the region's film makers.

So far, the goals and ambitions of the guild are exactly in line with our own expectations and, naturally, we're fully involved. I'm now in charge of their Facebook page.

04-Jul-11: To blog or not to blog?

Eagle-eyed visitors will have noticed that updates to these web pages have become infrequent to the point of being embarrassing. Have we really so little to say?

Yeah, I guess so.

But that's not the whole story. It rarely is.

As many of you may remember, I became totally and utterly pissed off with my original blog, so much so that I took it out into the back garden one fine sunny morning and killed it stone dead with a single shot to the back of the head. Bang. Gone. Dead. I love that metaphor. It speaks volumes, certainly about me and absolutely about the way I felt about the blog at the time.

The reasons for this strange action were many and varied but essentially boiled down to one individual who had become just a little too familiar, too demanding, to the point where his attentions became intrusive, both to me and my family. That was when we decided to execute the blog.

Thereafter, I decided to go forwards and actually live a life, my life, rather than just talk about it in the pages of a blog.

Inevitably, after a while, I decided that I missed the blog and tried to resurrect it via a couple of external platforms, specifically WordPress and tumblr. The available toolsets were actually pretty good and well suited to the task of blogging though, in the end, I was never comfortable with investing large amounts of time and effort in a platform that we didn't control and that might, ultimately, simply cease to exist at some point in time in the future. There was also some question regarding who actually owned the contents of the blog - me, as the author, or the platform, as the hosting agent.

One other small point - The tumblr domain contains much that is undesirable in a family-friendly site and, as I've discovered to my cost, accidentally clicking on the wrong icon can flood your stream with images and videos that have no relation to our main message, which is the music.

So, the blog is back. Onwards and upwards...

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