gavin bryars...

last saturday i went to a performance of several pieces created by gavin bryars and collen colleen for the bells of the leeds parish church*.
i arrived in good time, grabbed a chicken tikka sarnie and a slab of very reasonably priced bakewell from the church cafe, had a pleasant chat with the warden/verger bloke and joined the small crowd on the lawn out the back of the church to listen.

there’s something very evocative about church bells and the way the individual notes in a sequence seem to almost topple into each other – colleen’s pieces brought back childhood memories of holidays in wells-next-the-sea, and holidays at me nan and grandad’s in uppingham. i thought about how music is essentially patterns, and how you don’t often notice birdsong until it’s interrupting something that you’re trying to concentrate on.
gavin bryars compositions were great – layered and shifting and kind of hypnotic. there was one utterly fantastic bit near the end when the ringers were effectively playing chords – it sounded like somebody bashing out great slabs of noise on some monstrous grand piano… [apparently simultaneous ringing like that is pretty unusual and quite difficult to perform...]

it was a relatively non-visual event – all the action was hidden away in the church tower, but once you got into it it was kind of enjoyable lazing about in the sun, watching the cherry blossom drift overhead… and then as the final peals rang out, the first spots of rain began to fall.

tomorrow night I’m off to see dave gedge perform the songs of the wedding present with the bbc big band. could be amazing, could be terrible, but either way it should be quite an evening…

*[it’s part of the week-long ‘fuseleeds’ music festival…]

greenbelt 08 visual arts movie... [full-length]

[for leeds-based viewers - see if you can spot big mike love!]

more leeds resurrection pics

[previously blogged here]

on the desk recently...

...a couple of vector images done in Illustrator [most of my stuff is done in Photoshop] for an ELT software project.
the original artwork has elements which are designed to be animated [in a fairly basic way...]

rooster russell and rofe...

this will be brilliant at greenbelt this year...

visionaries

my brilliant wife and monsters vs aliens

my splendid missus sue just got accepted onto a phd course starting in september.
this is a big thing for us - it's quite a career swerve for her and it'll be a bit of a learning curve for all of us as a family [she won't be working teacher's hours for a start, so school holidays will be interesting!]
it's exciting though!

last nite me and the boys went to the opening film of the leeds young people's film festival, which is a great annual event in our calendar... the movie that they'd chosen to open with was 'monsters vs aliens', and despite a slow start [not unlike 'the incredibles', actually] it really gets going and we all loved it. i laughed so hard at one point that i lost a filling [absolutely true, though i was also chewing a toffee at the time...]
if you liked shrek and kung-fu panda, then i suspect you'll enjoy monsters vs aliens too...



so that's two movies in a week. it's almost like having a social life... :-)