Author Archive for Al

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Hi There!

Published by Al on May 26, 2011 in Audio, Lamfrag, Mixed Media, Photography, Theatre and VIDEOfeet. 0 Comments

A new post for all of our reader!

Sorry it’s been so long, reader. Nonetheless, I must press on and get down to business.

We’ve finally gotten ourselves in the theatre to start work in earnest on our GFtA-funded project LOOM/THADOWS LOOM. Had a great day last Friday, learnt a lot about what we can do (and probably more importantly, what we CAN’T do…) and generally had a really productive time. And, for that matter, a lot of fun. One of the things that really struck me was how, when we were working in the space, there was no thought given at all to this being work or tiring in any way shape or form, but when we got home…whew…suddenly we all just collapsed as one…

So, without further ado and in no particular order, here are a whole bunch of nice pictures from the day:

It’s Matt and Jim!

Looking into the light coming out from the projector

Mmm, smoke machine. Mmm projector. One of the things we found is that the projector we bought is fantastic.

How did a stripy shirted shaven ape get in the theatre? And where is it going with that cardboard?

And what the hell is wrong with his feet! Put that down!

Just to point out to our (possibly imaginary) reader – we made all the projection material. It’s all us and none of it is stuff from 2001 that we just using for test purposes.

And the image being projected here is something that Jim got on his visit to the Hubble space telescope. He used the ‘Space telescope to Canon EF mount’ adaptor that he got off Amazon.

Just smoke and lights…

You can’t tell, but in this picture I’m using a wicked bit of freeware called ‘ppooll’ (www.ppooll.klingt.org) to remix Madonna into something completely unrecognisable. I’ll post that up here as soon as I can whop it onto Soundcloud.

Escalator Grant

Published by Al on January 21, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

We’re past the first stage of applying for an Arts Council Escalator Grant! The idea of getting money to make art seems pretty incredible to us. But it is looking more and more like an actual reality!

Escalator have accepted our proposal so it looks like we’ll get it, but you can’t take anything for granted in the current (economic/political/social) climate. So wish us luck!

Massive thanks to the lovely people of Trestle for putting us forward for this and huge thanks to Kate at The Junction for accepting our initial proposal!

I can’t put in any more exclamation marks to show how great this is. Yes I can! (!!!!!!!)

Infanta Poster

Published by Al on January 21, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

After a lot of work Matt has finally finished the poster for Trestle Unmasked and Increpacion Danza’s theatre production of ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. We’re really pleased with it and we think they are too.

Initial inspiration for the feel of the poster came from the work of the artist Mark Ryden (www.markryden.com) – the difficulty lay mainly in doing something with a similar feel, but within our own style and not derivative of his work. It took time to get there but we definitely feel we have achieved this goal.

Here are some of the production images from the poster design. This one is Matt’s compositional sketch for the poster:

This is the original pencil drawing of the central figure in the poster:

This is the original sketch that Matt did of the ‘ugly boy’ in the play. This was not used in the final poster but a variation on this has been used for the flipside of the flyer.

The next step on our work for ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ is a series of promo films for the show. At the moment we’re working on a short (20 second) teaser promo, the next step will be some interviews with the director, Emily Gray, and this will be followed by a full promo before the tour commences in March.

Chris Taylor’s Birthday

Published by Al on January 21, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

We went to The Book Club in Shoreditch for our friend, the beautiful and brilliant artist/photographer/maker of enclosures for exotic creatures Chris Taylor’s birthday. Matt gave him this ink portrait. It’s not flattering, but it is Chris. I didn’t get him anything ‘cos I’m a cheap ass. Nonetheless, Happy Birthday Chris!

New Disperse Site Up

Published by Al on January 21, 2011 in General. 0 Comments

I’ve just got a new website finished for my (our?) net-label. You can check it out here: www.disperserecords.co.uk

So that’s one step closer to actually establishing Disperse Records as an actual functioning entity that people know about. The next step on the way is to finalize a couple more releases, then put together a press release to tell the world about it all this music/noise stuff!

On that tip we already have a new release up on the site. It’s called ‘The Yellow Emperor’ and it’s an album by ‘Arthur Winkler NOW!’. It’s a collage of a load of improvisations by myself and Matt and we’re really pleased with it. We reckon it’s a fairly unique listening experience, but please wander over to Disperse, download it from our Soundcloud and judge for yourself!

Here’s the cover, based on a pencil drawing that you can check out in an earlier blog post:

Arthur Winkler NOW! - The Yellow Emperor cover

Rust Photos

Published by Al on October 13, 2010 in Photography. 2 Comments

Over the last couple of years I’ve been getting photos; full frame shots of close ups of various types of corruption – mould and algae growing on a board creating beautiful colours and textures, rotting and sagging tarmac on the side of a local carpark that is reminiscent of the skin of an elephant or the surface of the moon and most recently photos taken of the rust and corrosion on a burnt out car – of which these are a couple of examples…

New Drawings

Published by Al on September 24, 2010 in ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN and Original Artworks. 0 Comments

We’ve been so busy at the moment, it’s been hard to find the time to put up bloggins posts. So this is the first in a while!

These two (as yet unnamed) pencil drawings are works in progress from a possible future series of art prints…

The intention is eventually to print them on a large scale as a series of pictures, using these pencil drawings as starting points in the process. However the rest of the method of printing, size etc. is still in flux. Time to experiment!

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New Design/Illustration

Published by Al on June 16, 2010 in ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN and VIDEOfeet. 0 Comments

These are just a couple of process sketches Matt has been working on. This first is a sketch of a MauMau warrior for the theatre performance ‘Burn My Heart’ produced by Blindeye and Trestle:

These next couple are a sketch and an ink drawing for ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, a proposed theatre performance at Trestle Theatre:

Thomas Paine Flyer

Published by Al on June 16, 2010 in ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN and VIDEOfeet. 0 Comments

Here are a couple of process images from the flyer we recently designed for Trestle Theatre, under the title “Thomas Paine: The Liberty Tree”. It was to promote a performance by two singer/songwriters, Leon Rosselsson and Robb Johnson with the titular free thinker as the theme.

This is the finished flyer:

It came together with ideas and work from all three of us; we especially wanted to have the tree as a central connecting image for the design, from this came the idea of having the roots spelling out the title of the piece. I created the text using a simple sans serif font to get the layout and give a guideline, then worked over that in pencil and ink:

Meanwhile Jim created this sweet guitar/tree motif in Photoshop. Here you can see it coloured and integrated with the text:

This was unfortunately unusable in the end as the brief stated the need to use pictures of the performers. To this end Matt created this sketch, and followed from there, inking it over the lightbox and eventually bringing all the separate components together for the final design:

Cyclic Defrost

Published by Al on March 30, 2010 in General. 0 Comments

Cyclic Defrost is an Australian electronic music magazine I happened upon when I found a really good interview with Christian Fennesz. It seems to be pretty good, with nice design and layout, as well as good writing about interesting music – I just read a real insightful interview with Autechre that I hadn’t seen before there as well. What is more every issue is free to download online in PDF form. That’s a lot of reading!

The picture above is the front and back cover of issue 16. It is a wicked bit of design.

Author Archive for Al

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