Foilface Free EP download – Going offline soon…

As the summer draws on there’s a stirring in the souls of those young men responsible for the Foilface project. A (necessary) hiatus means things have kinda ground to halt for a couple of months, disgraceful I know but it wouldn’t happen if it didn’t need to, and as we know modern day living is bullshit and it gets in the way of the good stuff.

Anyway this is just a heads up as there’s talk of the UTTERLY FREE Foilface EP ‘Jean-Claude Naive’ being taken down in a few weeks, probably never to return. If you don’t already have a copy you should rush over to foilface.com right now to nab one. Once it’s been taken down there will be a remastered, actual physical copy up for grabs on the site on something called a ‘compact disc’, I hear it’s like a very thin circular memory stick.

Anyway, geddit before it’s gone, the foily cogs are about to start turning yo.

Foilface – Deepdown

My favourite Foilface tune this, possibly has something to do with the fact that they recorded it before I officially joined. It’s a terrible shame but the PC masters have been lost so this ‘ok-quality’ mp3 of an initial rough mix is the only surviving testament.

Before you press play you should smoke a fatty or eat a bowl or whatever it is you young bohemian types do these days to get off.

!!! Free mp3 download !!!

Broken TV video

We recently had an unfortunate accident in the Higham household where a 32″ LCD TV that we use for some PS3 and Wii action received a fatal mystery blow. I’m pretty sure it must have been caused by a flying controller of some description, my money is on one of the wii controllers, probably during a wii Sports bowling frenzy. I was a little upset but it’s only a TV, and I rarely get upset by something breaking, in fact I sometimes quite like the idea of now being able to poke around with it in a bid to break it some more, all in the name of exploration.

So I decided to give it one last chance to do something worthwhile – I noticed that if I pressed the various buttons on the side it now made some interesting and alluring shapes and colours so I set up a video camera and prodded away. I got some nice results but eventually got bored so decided to see if I could develop the spiderweb crack in the top corner by pushing the fractures around.

The result of my experiment is the video above, the only post-production I did was some basic timeline editing and speed manipulation, all the colours and shapes and effects are simply the death throes of a generic 32″ LCD TV being bullied.

Oh and the soundtrack is ten minutes of freestyle Reaktor 5 noodling chopped up to fit, once again, all done inside the timeline of Final Cut Pro.

Celestial DSLR Time Travel

Here’s a link to the above clouds in glorious HD

This one worked out much better in terms of collecting footage. I managed to find a short-throw lens from an LCD projector that screws right onto the front of my factory fitted Canon 18-55 lens for a slightly wider angle, also I rewired the TC-80N3 intervalometer so the camera now runs in full manual mode. As far as timing goes, all shots are somewhere between 2 and 7 seconds apart.

What I really need to get some great cloudlapse footage is a decent 10-20mm lens, the body of the camera is really irrelevant, a few hundred quids worth of Sigma glass in front of it would make things much more beautiful. Anyway not to worry. it’s just a study, I’m not trying to break any records.

The music is ‘A New Kinda World’ by Foilface – visit foilface.com for more free recent music downloads and news on the band.

In other news I saw an amazing video yesterday showing the effects of sound waves on a non-newtonian liquid, so assuming I’ve got time this evening I’ll have a 12 inch Celestion speaker rigged up to a bowl of custard while I push sub-tones through it and take pictures. Exciting? You’re damn straight.

Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with the pentatonic scale

Title says it all really, music is a universal language.

“Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

Hello Everybody Eyebrows

Here’s a recent effort from camp Foilface called Hello Everybody Eyebrows. It’s a wonky pop-soaked romp with a ton of live viola parts. It’s just a rough mix for now, tossed onto the pile of 30 odd other rough mixes, hopefully one day soon the glory days of Foilface gay abandon will come back and we’ll snap into sloth like action, slowly churning out an insane amount of work whilst skinning up with the other hand.

Anyway press play to play the tune.

Hidan – Timeline Music for iPhone

I’ll apologise now if you’re completely sick of me banging on about this iPhone video, it’s not that I’m especially pleased with it (there are a hundred things I’d change if I could be bothered to tweak it), it’s more an experiment with distribution and promotion of digital media.

So with that being said I couldn’t start a whole new personal blog without using it to pimp a few of my recent creative efforts, it’s really the only real reason The Blow Hole exists, to document the creative process and to push things forward on the creative front.

So expect a bunch of new stuff to start flowing soon, as I tweak and tune the blog I’ll drop the odd post on recent digital shenanigans.

At the end of May I finished a new Timeline Music Video for iPhone called Hidan, it’s up at Vimeo and can be viewed directly below.

There aren’t a great deal of Timeline Music examples around at the time of writing, the short story is that it’s extremely time consuming due to the musical composition part being done with tiny chunks of video. Video editing software really isn’t up to scratch in terms of musical composition so the process is clunky and frustrating, it’s this boundary that interests me, having a defined line in the sand as to exactly how something can be achieved is a real inspiration.

Anyway here’s the Video, leave a comment if you haven’t already seen it, in fact leave one if you have, I’m keen to share ideas, especially on software and composition.