By: Matt
When I was a child, I received a bumper-sized colouring book every Christmas. I’d immediately set to work with crayons, filling the pages with a chaotic scrawl that each year got closer to staying inside the thick black lines. Eventually, I outgrew this activity and a different type of book began to appear among my presents. When I was perhaps eight or nine years old, I opened my first diary.
Just like the colouring books, the diary demanded that I filled it in, albeit in a different way. First, I’d dutifully enter forthcoming birthdays and family occasions, the the pages in between would wait to be filled with thoughts and missives from my tiny life. Each day brought its own deadline, demanding that something would happen that was exciting enough to write in the diary. But nothing seemed important enough to be recorded, not even on the cheap ruled paper inside my nylon Filofax wannabe.
As a child, recording my own story was a terrifying responsibility. With new platforms for self expression such as blogging and social media, it’s become a casual habit. But are we also recording our stories in ways that we barely notice?
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By: Rob
“I think the mind makes its own places…”
From ‘The Signal-Man’ by Charles Dickens
The first thing to consider when approaching August Stars’ fearsome new EP ‘Invisible in the Dusk’ is how to listen to it. Sebastien Wright’s dark ambient project is deeply entwined with, and inspired by, frost-bitten, horror-tinged train journeys through Northern England landscapes. Placing it on the lounge stereo feels wrong somehow, like being in a room with a broken window. But with a little set dressing – a Dickensian gas lamp here, a Jack ‘O’ Lantern there – Wright’s barely-there music, described on his blog as “journeys across the desolate Pennines, train rides through rainswept northern towns and the loneliness… which comes with moving to a new city…” can be teased and tamed to warm itself at the fire. And the Dusk reveals its spectral secrets…
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By: Matt
Photo: Dave De Hetre via Flickr
Setting a scene in a tight space can be hard; limits in form or length are often-encountered challenges when adapting content for different platforms. If you want an economical example of scene-setting, you could do worse than listen to the song ”Hotel California”.
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