Synoiz Music Blog

Posted 7th June 2009

Hello there everyone,
I've been pretty rubbish with blogging lately, I used to bother everyone at least once a week but lately not so much. Things are stressful but wonderful for me at the moment, the other week myself and Kirsty (of forthcoming sideproject Siren) wrote the press release for the "Long Lost..." single, they're basically what you give to record labels/shops to describe your release. It was horrible having to think of ways to big myself up! Then again if it was up to self-defeatist old me I'd probably write like:

"Long Lost... is the debut single from pretty much unknown stumbling-in-the-dark strategist Synoiz. We're not expecting it to do very well but give it a listen and possibly buy it"

Apparently this is not what marketing is about.

You can read the final press release we wrote on the Last.fm page for Long Lost... (you can also listen to the full tracks off the release)
Long Lost... on Last FM

Long Lost... Video Shoot
At the moment I am sitting in the garden with my housemate Agata enjoying the first day off I've had in like 2 weeks. For the past three days myself and director Ian Lawlor, co-director Mark Liddle and wonderful extra Phil Heckles have been filming the video for "Long Lost..." (very small crew I know but the video is rather minimal and since it's all in daylight we thankfully don't need lighting rigs).

Tomorrow will be the last day of filming and we'll be down in Seaburn, we need to use the pier and it's been too stormy these past few days to film safely there. Thankfully I've managed to speak with the pier authorities and they're gonna open it up for us tomorrow morning and allow us to get our shots in, I think we'll be under supervision but who cares lol.

You can watch my latest VBlog (filmed on the way home from shooting on Saturday) on YouTube by clicking here.

Agata and the carrot cake
In other news I introduced Agata (natively from Poland if that makes a difference) to carrot cake. She thought I was joking to start with "A cake with carrot? Is it not sweet?" so I went off and bought some for her and before I could blink she'd decided they were the nicest thing in the world and munched like the packet!
Then she went on a big guilt trip and so we went down to the 24/7 garage to buy some more cakes (Although I think she had another agenda other than apology as the cakes are already disappearing fast...), so we're in the garden next to the fire with tea and cakes. This is how all days off should be :D

There will be more news soon about the Long Lost... single. It should appear in a few online shops on the 15th of June (next monday) however the OFFICIAL (ie it is when I say it is) release date from me may be the week after. This is due to a cock-up on my part not realising that iTunes takes forever to process new releases.

Posted 27th May 2009

Hello everyone, today we're re-shooting the video for my first single from "Ambients", "Long Lost...". We're doing this because a) we didn't like the original footage as it was a bit naff, and b) we had a much better idea for the video after filming for the third single.

I've woken up ill today which isn't a good start but hopefully I can grab a lemsip and hot bath and manage to hide it from the camera! We'll be doing the shooting at both Seaburn in Sunderland and Tynemouth in Newcastle although sadly we're not in need of any extras :( boo video concept!

Important change to single release
Now this is where you're going to kill me. I know in previous blogs, vblogs etc I've stated that "Long Lost..." will be free to download, however this is no longer the case.
Due to a worry I had regarding which distributor to use to get the album "Ambients" on iTunes and Amazon, I have decided to test-the-waters with the single and have submitted that to be digitally available. This means that to download the 3-track "Long Lost..." single will cost you like £1.50 or such which, while not free, is still a tasty deal.
Plus I'm trying to work out a way of offering a free bonus track to people who can prove their purchase just to show that I'm not focussed on the bling.
I just didn't want to throw the album at iTunes and then learn that they now own all the rights and profits to it because I missed some small print somewhere!

Anyway it's bath time now, wish me luck today,
Hope you're all doing great!!!

P.S Pray for rain and stormy skies for us today if you can, we need gloomy cloud shots and so I'm scared we'll have another perfect sunny day like yesterday!

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!

Posted 15th March 2009

Finally, another blog! And yeah I know I said I'd do one on Thursday night the day after the video shoot but I failed. I can't believe how hectic things have been this past week, I barely got any music done even though I was working on Synoiz stuff all week. Does that make sense? :D

Well basically Wednesday was the day from hell. I got up at 9am (not too bad) and had to go to town to pick up things like razor blades (to get a good shave for the video), to pay my rent and to get additional costumes from Primark for the extras. Sadly for whatever reason I have a £300 withdrawl limit on my account so had to go to the bank specifically and get them to give me money over the counter without my chequebook!

All that went quite well until I tried to drop it all off at Ian's where we were meeting later and he wouldn't get out of bed! So I had to carry 4 heavy bags literally across the city to go home get bathed and shaved and then dash through to Newcastle for hairdressing appointment.

This is where it got worst cos during the train journey all I got was txts or calls with bad news, being told that we had lost one of the cars and so I had to organise some other way to get the extras to the set on time, then being told that the lighting rig and second camera weren't actually working and that it was impossible to get new parts for them that day. I ended up getting quite angry about it all (I mean, there's been two months to just plug the stuff in and go "oh it doesn't work, I'll order some parts in before we have to do the shoot..." rather than checking it on the day of shooting).

Then I got off in Newcastle to find that my order of prop masks had not actually
come in on time and that we had to make do with the masks we had. Finally got to the hairdressers and after 40 minutes walked out with exactly the same haircut (and problems) as I walked in with albeit slightly shinier.

There's a lot more I could rant about as much more stuff went wrong but essentially I think that gives off just how stressful the day was for me.

However, when we finally got to the shoot and I met up with the extras and nattered on with them everything kinda fell away and I started enjoying myself again. Here's a video I took on the set:



Ian Lawlor (director) and Mark Liddle (co-directing) really took the reigns well and just fell into their roles and did a wonderful job (Also kudos to Mark Junkin and my mum for providing lifts at the last minute and for being wonderful).

Sadly we didn't manage to get all the extras scenes done in the one night as we'd hoped so we explained to the guy who owns the location and he has mercifully said he'll give us another few days with the location. All the extras had fun and are going to return back and hopefully we'll have it in the can.

The next bit of shooting is actually tonight, and ironically the electricity and gas have gone off in my house so I am unable to bathe or work on music or anything so am staying at a mate's house until I can get in touch with the landlord... Grrrr. In fact I'm typing this on Mr Macbook while lying on a mattress in their spare room. God it's a classy life lol. Let's hope it goes well again today and we get things sorted. Once again thank you to everyone involved, especially the extras for being so wonderful and patient!

(I have loads more to say but this blog has been long enough, I might try and d =o a VBlog in the future if these get any longer!)

See you all later! :D

Posted 11th March 2009

Hey again,
I can't sleep, went to bed at like 1:30am and have just woken up at 8 and unable to get back to sleep so thought I'd double check everything again and post a new blog to wake myself up.
Today is a big day for me as we are filming the main scenes for one of my music videos. Essentially these are the "oooh fancy" bits which we only have one shot at (you'll have to wait for the video to find out why - or join the Facebook group...) and it's been chaos to organise. I have been at work fulltime for the last month or so, so yesterday I was at work till 5, then I had a singing lesson until half 7, then I had to meet with the directors and ended up arguing with them for 2 hours cos I want it done exactly how I imagined it and they think it'll work better this other way etc, they're right I know, however the case I was making was "Well we only have one evening to do all this section, so can't we attempt to film my version of this shot as well just incase we decide to use it in editing after all?" I'd rather not walk away with "Oh yeah it would have been nice to have a shot like that..." bits when we can't shoot them again.
Okay, okay, maybe I'm not the easiest person to work with! Mark Liddle (Co-directing) stated it as "You have your artistic vision and we have our directoral vision". I think they're just happy cos when I'm on set tonight I've said I'll keep quiet and just do as they say, after all they're the directors but I just want to be sure that we're both aiming for the same video here.



Anyway it should be fun, but today is me running around all day buying last-minute props for new extras and then getting things like hair sorted and slightly dolled up, just to get mucked up again for the video, weird how these things work eh? So I start running about in 10 minutes and then finish at 11pm tonight only to go to work again tomorrow at 7, huzzah!

Just to keep you entertained though, here are some photos I forgot about from the location hunting for this, as you can see the place is horrible and looks worse than these pictures can show, but it works so well for the song and video:







New Album Update
Oh and if you're waiting for information on the new album "Soundtract" (new name that has recently been kinda decided on... by me and Anguaji) don't worry, it's coming and I'm working my little rear off on it, but there will be a website made for it so that you can actively participate in the finalising of the songs. All very exciting but that's stuff for another blog methinks.

"The Esoteric Order of Dagon" on OurStage (Again)
This has totally taken me by surprise but I thought, after hitting the top ten with my track in Experimental on OurStage, that this month it would just get thrown to the back of the charts, and that's what happened, it dropped right down to like #200-odd, but now I wake up and check and after a lot of lovely fans voting for it, it's back at #4 lol. How amazing is that? It's cheered me up a bit when all I can think of is work right now.

I'll try to post another blog tomorrow if I'm not too knacked,
Wish me luck!