Synoiz Music Blog

Posted 22nd September 2009

Just a quick update today. It was a crazy day, one of those everything goes wrong type days. People being all grumbly around me, dodgy weather, missed my bus, lost ticket so had to pay again etc. When I got home this evening I was in a right strop with the world, was about to press the ignition on my doom lazer (which I obviously have so be warned).

Then I did something I never, ever do. I just said f*ck it. Stepped away from the computer and the artwork that needs doing, the website that needs building, and went to run a bath. Then I spent like 3 hours in there, just chilling. Watching the Studio Ghibli film "Whisper of the Heart" on my laptop across the room. Kinda put things in perspective and calmed me down a lot.

Essentially the moral of the film is that the work we do is always "in progress" and that we should never attempt to do things perfectly first time. Made me realise that yeah, while I'm still gonna push my debut album all I can, it'll probably not be till like the fourth or fifth album I release that someone goes "hey this is sounding pretty good, come help out with this soundtrack" or something. I've always been around music and yet I've never made it myself until I started the Synoiz project. Just gets a bit scary when a lot of the people I look up to or am surrounded by are like classically trained pianists who have been writing songs since they could walk etc.
Every track I create I can feel it coming together more.

Plus I got a wonderful email reply from Rob from Temposhark, really boosted my mood even more. I'll be down in London this weekend to see them live, and then I'm going down next weekend as well to be an extra in their next music video too. Good times.

Anyway the LIST! As you can see, not much ticked off so far, but the stuff I've bracketed (is that a word) are things that progress is being made on. I sent the b-side for "Getting Safer" to my friend Lori Cunningham and she pointed out that it was way too dissonant lol. So working on that a bit more before sending it off to Ghostsmut for mastering.

The big news is that the album CD artwork is nearly done, the limited-run physical copy of "Ambients" should look -awesome-. Here's a sneaky look at my paper-clipped-together-printed-on-a-bubblejet copy:

Thanks for reading! See you soon.

Posted 15th May 2009

(This was written on Friday on the bus but I haven't had time to upload it until now!)

On the bus to London at the moment, I was kinda dreading it as usually coach trips are agony but thankfully I've got a bit of leg/laptop room and there's no screaming children apparent (seriously though, why would you take your newborn on a 7 hour coach journey? I always wonder about the logic there, maybe they're all masochists...)

Things have been weird for the past two or so weeks and I just haven't stopped. I've been so busy with my music, my job and helping people out that I have had no time for sleep, been scraping by on 4 hours sleep and then getting up for the 9-5 for 4 days of the week. Last night I was up till about 1am finalising a version of "Ambients" to give to the lovely Rob of Temposhark when I get to meet him this weekend. They're filming the music video for their new single "The World Does Not Revolve Around You" on Saturday and I'm lucky enough to be one of the many extras on it. I'll probably be tweeting all about it so if you don't already you can follow me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/synoiz

I'm glad the Temposhark thing came up though as it means I get to catch up with all my London mates while I'm down there, I haven't seen Mark in yages and apparently he's finished his first novel finally. We'd always been bouncing stories off each other for years but he's the only one to actually knuckle down and complete a novel. I got like 200 pages into mine and then realised it was unfollowable dirge lol.

Also as people from Twitter will know I've become a bit of an eBay-aholic this past week, yesterday I bought a Sony digital camera for only £65 and the phone I've wanted for ages, the HTC G1 for just £108. It's hardly breaking the bank like but it's nice for me to stop being frugal for a bit, although I should be saving for getting the physical copies of "Ambients" printed!

Err... what else... oh yeah. A rather downbeat new VBlog is available on YouTube if you want to check it out: Synoiz on YouTube filmed after spending two days mastering the album in Edinburgh and realising I wasn't sure about any of it.

Oh yeah, watch this space too as I was helping a friend out with his final year uni art project for photography on Wednesday (how strange to think that this time last year I wrote the "Chernobyl" OST for another friend for exactly the same exhibition!) and we ended up taking some Synoiz promo shots. All I'm going to say is that they're both beautiful and horrible. We were on an old spot of wasteland if that gives you an idea what to expect. I doubt they're gonna sell any albums but I loved what I saw on his little camera screen thing.

Hope you're all doing well, thanks for reading this!