Relative Silence

This is a song which was written by my friend Chris and I for a University assignment. It was written as 3 parts to achieve 3 outcomes;

Part 1 COMPOSITION: Written as a collaboration, sitting down together working on it like we were in a band, which at the time we were. We began writing this piece with the idea to make a piece which was progressive and long, as it was our first composition assignment at University without a 4 minute time restraint.
The only instruments recorded live on this part are the electric and acoustic guitars and the bass guitar.

Part 2 RE-COMPOSITION: Was written by Chris. As he had the microphones and Pro Tools setup he recorded more guitar parts and we continued in the rock vein for the song. As with the first part of this song, the only real instruments are the guitars and bass. All the rest are sampled.

Part 3 DECOMPOSITION: Was remixed by me. This part of the piece ended up being the longest part of the piece. For the first 2/3 of the decomposition I used only material which had already been played, it was recycling basically. Samples of the first segment were taken, heavily effected and manipulated and then laid out to form a new movement.

There is a music video for this song, all 22 minutes of it in Audio Visual glory. The problem with the video is that it was only started 24 hours before the assignment was due in. Ooops!

Creating 22 minutes of video from basically archival footage and whatever I could shoot around my house at 2am went into the heavily edited and manipulated video. The final output for this project would be a DVD; on this DVD the chapter markers would be placed on random parts of the song some chapters being minutes long, some chapters being as short as a second or two.

The goal of this seemingly random placement of chapter markers was not done for the sake of being able to skip through the piece; they were placed in an attempt to create a different version of the song each time you put the DVD in your player just by hitting the “random chapter” button. Thus creating a new piece of music each time it was played.

One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Such a soft spot in my heart for the little guy.

Calling All Cars supported Cog at Waves on the 2nd of July. Their lighting setup was much better than the openers, Earth Mechanics, as the back-lighting allowed for better action shots from faster shutter speeds of the band.

The singer/guitarist was fantastic to shoot. Despite having no familiarity with any of their music, the energy they displayed on stage was infectious. With the guitarist soloing from the speaker stack above me i was given a fantastic opportunity to get some amazing photos, however I struggled to get the pictures that I had hoped to get. The lighting from the stage did not reach onto the speaker stack so I quickly had to setup the camera to compensate and as I did this I spotted the guitarist bending his knees ready to leap off the speaker stack back onto the stage. As fast as I could I set the cameras focal point to where I estimated he would be landing and tried to get the camera set up as best I could in the time I had. He jumped directly in front of me, but the fixed lense meant that framing the shot was difficult and I didn’t end up getting a shot that I was happy with from him jumping off the speakers. Next time I’ll be ready….