Winds and Breezes

Thursday, July 21, 2005

Moving house

I have just implemented a new website at windsandbreezes.org. All new content is going to be posted there.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

TrekEarth

Currently, I use Flickr to get my photographs up on to the internet. I got into it much as everyone else was starting to use it, and I chose it for two reasons a) I wasn't aware of any other quick and easy alternative, and b) it was easier than coding up a site myself - I just didn't have the time.

As I'm now in the process of putting my own site together, I'll be revisiting that. However, I'm aware that in many respects, I'm almost a Flickr failure - I never quite got into the community side of things. In the meanwhile, I've discovered deviantart which is very heavily pushed by some users of the photography board on boards.ie, and although there are certain aspects of it I find interesting, I've decided not to go for it. The reason for this is I have happened across something which I wish I had thought of. I've happened across TrekEarth and I've decided to put the odd photo up there for criticism. The main concentration is on travel photography - the first photograph I have put up there is this one of a sunset in Brittany.

The photographs are sorted geographically which suits me, and you can only submit one photograph per 24 hour period. What they are trying to do - introduce the world through photography - interests me as an idea. It's almost like a community based National Geographic. I also like the workshop idea which offers a major scope for learning to improve your photography, a central ethos on the site.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

On the technical front

I've had a bad evening with Drupal. I don't know if anyone else uses it, but I had db connection issues tonight and eventually gave up. I'm not a MySQL expert and when it flings out a DB lost connection, then despite all the evidence to the contrary in terms of having done things exactly as I was told to by the documentation, I must have done something wrong.

Hopefully I'll be more successful tomorrow evening - even if I am not, I will look at putting in a couple of wordpress blogs instead.

Monday, July 18, 2005

on the return of television

One month without television equals one month without ads for that insane frog.

The setting up of my cable television this morning reminds me what I have been missing...and how I haven't really missed it at all.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Music from the CD shelves - Didier Squiban

If you are interested in sea-scape photography at all, the chances are you will have come across the work of Philippe Plisson. If you read this blog regularly, you will certainly have come across the name on one or two occasions.

Philippe Plisson is based in a small village in Brittany called La Trinite sur Mer. It's known for a number of things - it has a pretty huge marina, and the approach into it is via one of those stunning bridges which the French always seem to be building. It's near Carnac which is world famous for its megaliths.

If you've ever clicked on Philippe Plisson's website, you might have noticed a piece of piano music playing in the background. It's the opening notes from an album called Molene by a musician called Didier Squiban.

I first came across Didier Squiban the musician when someone played a track called Maryvonig An Dourduff by a singer called Yann-Fanch Kemener. Yann-Fanch Kemener has, apparently, played the odd gig here in Ireland, but I've never been lucky enough to catch him. The easiest way to describe what he does is Breton sean-nos, with marginally fewer versus. A Breton friend of mine insisted on playing it for me after she discovered that I knew quite a bit about Breton music (ie, I had a couple of albums by Ar Re Youank and Carre Manchot) and I was quite taken by the track. Although Yann-Fanch has a gorgeous voice to listen to, what stood out to me was the piano accompaniment - it was like nothing else on earth I had ever heard. In Ireland, there's Michael O Suilleabhan who is the bench mark of traditional music on the piano, but what he did bore no relation to the sound of this track underneath a highly traditional voice. I bought a copy of the album. You'll find audio extracts from the album on this page - it's amazon.fr.

Some time later, I was in FNAC in Brussels - where I've been known to spend rather more money than I should - and sitting in the world music collection was this album by Didier Squiban, called Molene. It blew my mind. I've played piano since I was about 9 - I'm not very sure what age I was when I started - but I'd never heard anything like this. Maybe part of it was the exoticism of the Breton music - most of the Breton music I was accustomed to was the dance stuff. I knew very, very little of the more reflective side of things. It's fair to say none of it featured on my Alan Stivell albums. You'll find audio extracts to the album here, again through our friends in amazon.fr. Apart from the music, what I really liked about the album was that it came accompanied by a booklet of photographs, all of which were taken, I think, around the island of Molene.

In the ordinary way of things, this would have been the only album he produced because audio pearls which I come across tend to be one hit wonders, or so obscure that acquiring any more of their material becomes rather difficult. Molene turned out to be the first in a trilogy, and I found this out in a shop in Quimper, Finistere, a couple of years ago, when I laid my hands on the second and third albums, Porz Gwenn and Roz Bras.

Of the pair of them, the mindblowing album is Porz Gwenn. I've never actually managed to work out whether it, or Molene is the better album. Molene is very, very familiar to me - if it had been a record, it would now be unplayable because I've played it so much. But there is something equally special about Porz Gwenn. Molene is obviously the album which to a greater or lesser extent put Didier Squiban on the musical map, but there's something so powerful about Porz Gwenn which lights my heart. Amazon.fr is kind enough to link to some audio extracts again.

The third album, Roz Bras has never quite done the same for me. It's a good deal more jazz oriented than the other two - where Michael O'Suilleabhan draws on classical music, Didier Squiban has pulled from jazz. This one was just a little too far jazzward for my liking. But it was followed up by Ballades which again I loved - including as it does a stunning jazz style rendition of Flower of Scotland, and most recently, he has released a live album from a tour of chapels which he did last year.

It's when I listen to music like this, which I have never heard on the radio here that I wish I had a radio program. Just thirty minute a week...it'd be okay, I could introduce people to some of the stuff they will never come across otherwise. I don't suppose anyone with any power and influence will be reading though.

As luck would have it, Didier Squiban is playing at the Festival Interceltique de Lorient in a couple of weeks time, unfortunately, not on a day that I'm going to be around. He's at one end of the week whereas the other four concerts I want to go to are at the other end of the week and I can't, for work reasons, do both.

A pointer to Rymus' latest photos

Rymus has just posted a bundle of really nice photographs including a stunning one of the lighthouse in Dunmore East. His weblog entry is here and this will take you to his Flickr slideshow.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Emmet Tinley inspired me to write this one

At least I think his name was Emmet Tinley, and he's playing live at the Crawdaddy (somewhere in Dublin) live, with half a band on Thursday and Friday. With that plug out of the way, we'll cut to the essential.

I've never happened across Emmet Tinley before, but last night, he opened for Yann Tiersen. The last couple of times I've been to Vicar Street, the support has generally been someone who has something in common with the main artist. I'm not sure Emmet Tinling had anything in common with Yann Tiersen, but that could be because I haven't yet listened to Emmet's album. On the strength of last night's outing, the current signs are that I won't be listening to Emmet's album, because Emmet just didn't do it for me last night. I found him somewhat heartworn and heartfelt and that's before we even get onto the songs which were also rather heartworn and heartfelt. Possibly if he had a piano player with him, I might not be so sharp because definitely one of the songs was screaming out for a piano accompaniment rather than the technically very nice guitar I was listening to, while just not getting engaged with the songs. Maybe I am 1) too cynical or 2) not quite heartbroken enough or 3) not in love enough.

However, I have to put my hand up and say, well Emmet is standing on the stage of Vicar Street and I gave up long before I got there. Or I didn't fight quite hard enough for it. Or maybe the block was just too much of a barrier.

I started writing songs when I was 19 years old, slightly unusually, after I had done my first, and currently only demo. I think there might only be four copies of that demo left in existance, but it consisted of four songs, none of which I had written myself. I must find it and see if there's anyway I can get it put down on a CD. I'm still quite proud of it.

The demo recording turned out to be an amazing experience - far better than I expected. I was doing it as a credit for a university course through German, and it was the only non-linguistic course I had done. The engineer/producer wasn't expecting much as I had been quiet in the back of the class, having trouble with the German, and I hadn't made much impression as someone with any musical skill at all, having done some work for another German group playiing Irish music (not one of my prouder moments). I had a day in the studio, and out of that day, I laid down two tracks, one with no major effort, thrown down at the end of the day, the other which stunned the engineer producer out of his "here's another student who thinks they can sing" lethargy. By the time he finished mastering it, he had mentally moved stuff around and got me another full day in the studio. I felt quite good about my talent at the time.

I figured that if I were going to go down the road of recording music and trying to make money out of it, it might be no bad thing to start writing songs. I'd been writing music, almost exclusively on the piano, since I was 14 years old, so that side of things wasn't ever going to be the hardest. The primary driving course in the decision was commercial; I reasoned that if I could write the music I was recording, then I would get to keep more of the money.

I promptly went off and wrote my first song which was called This World Isn't Turning, proof that contrariness can be a contrary old thing. This was an example from Angstridden Songwriting 101 (1-2 record sales max). I'm sure every single songwriter starts off by writing a song about what a mess the world is in. Mostly if I was writing bits for people I happened to hold particular affection for, it was bits of happy music and I discovered very quickly that I couldn't do the happy songs at all. So the commercial decision was shot to hell.

I wrote quite a few songs from the time I was 19 to when I was 28 or so. When I came back to Dublin, aged 27, I pushed myself into the songwriters evenings at the International a couple of times, went down reasonably well and was starting to think about doing a recording course in Temple Bar, and possibly going back and doing a couple of demos, my own stuff, still somewhat on the melancholic side admittedly, but I had plans for arrangements and stuff. Given a choice between singing live and recording, I'd have to say I prefer recording. The trouble for me now is that the last time I was in a recording studio was when I was 19 years old. Not long after I got back to Dublin, I started running into problems writing songs. I had some problems involving various men in my life and there were issues at work...and I just stopped playing music altogether. I can't remember the last time I wrote a piece of music for the piano and although there have been some times when it looked like I was breaking through the marble wall between turning an idea into a song, it's still four years or so since I last started and finished writing a song which survived quality control.

If I'm not playing music though, writing songs becomes rather difficult for me. The lyrics always came second and if I've not been playing music, I won't be writing it either, so I'll have nothing to hang lyrics on either.

Every so often though, there comes a moment, or a little knife that stabs me in the back and says "You had dreams once. You can build them again because the only one stopping you right now is You".

And Emmet Tinley was wielding one of those knives last night.

edit: I got Emmet's surname wrong...oops. Fixed now.

Yann Tiersen - Vicar Street Friday night

I've already given Yann Tiersen's current album, Le Retrouvailles, a very good review, (or at least better than I gave Harry Potter's latest outing), so I was looking forward to the concert.

There is a fairly major difference between Yann Tiersen on CD and Yann Tiersen live in Vicar Street. Yann Tiersen live in action is a wild untamed animal who comes on stage and plays music. He is a gifted man on the violin, I love what he does with the accordeon, he is a technically very competent guitarist.

He's a performer of extremes. There were moments of total and utter genius, moments of absolute joy. Likewise, there were moments of noise so hard to handle, I wondered if it was constantly the same person on stage. If I had to choose a word to describe Yann Tiersen in concert, I'd be reaching for "mercurial". I'm still at a loss now to decide whether I would go along for the ride a second time...or whether I'm the sort of Yann Tiersen fan that prefers him locked down and sanitised on a CD. If I am, then I wonder if I haven't, somehow, missed a major point.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Coming weekend

Monday I'll have a review of the latest instalment in the Harry Potter saga: I just haven't yet decided where or when I'm going to buy it.

Initially I was thinking that if I were up late on the Friday night (deliberately staying up late was not an option), I might move along to anyone of the four or five locations within three miles which will be selling the book at 1 minute past midnight.

Updates to my social life - namely the Yann Tiersen concert in Vicar Street tonight, which I will also review sometime after it's finished - means I'll be still lucid and awake at around 11.45.

However, I've been thinking. All the bookshops are likely to be full at midnight of people indulging in the party atmosphere. Some - many - of those people will be children. Being single and unencumbered by children, I'm wondering if I wouldn't feel terribly out of place. Also, I'm allergic to queues and I can't imagine that Easons would open at midnight if they didn't think they were going to make the bookshop's equivalent of a killing on the enterprise. As a result, I'm contemplating getting up early on Saturday morning and trying to beat the queues at Smyths that way. Knowing what I was like as a child, that mightn't work either. I think just about every place selling the book is planning special events and I know the local library is as well.

All that to say my wild exciting social plans for the weekend include Yann Tiersen and a trip to a bookshop, mainly because my plans to go to the south of Spain bit the dust.

I may be fated never to go to Spain again. Each of my attempts to go to Spain this year have been killed by circumstances outside my control. I'm just gathering crumbs.