Author: mister ebby

Glue, dancers, strings, and radio.

The week has been spent folding album covers whenever I’m not at work or away from the house. My desk is slowly becoming a graveyard of empty tubes of glue sticks. It’s quite sad really – perhaps I’ll make them into a little mini graveyard and use it for something or other. Which reminds me, I need to buy some more glue. The full funders’ edition is nearly done. When it is, I’ll be emailing those people who’ve still not sent in a postal address to get the CD sent to. If you’re not sure if you’ve sent me your address, you can always send it a second time just to be sure. But all things going to plan, the first lot will be getting posted quite soon.

I’ve been told the dancers are ready with their piece, which is quite exciting, and we’ve been talking about doing live performances of it somewhere too, but there’ll be more updates on that one when get to scheduling the video shoot. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this turns out, as it’s something completely new for me.

Coming up next for me though is an in-studio session with Flirt FM, and a concert with the string orchestra I play with too. The orchestra concert is free, so if you’re around Galway on Friday evening, drop into St. Mary’s school for a 7pm concert. It’s a very social event and the orchestra members are all bringing food, and doors open at 6pm for people looking for some pre-concert food, coffee, and chat. There’s some fierce baking competition amongst the orchestra members, so I’m confident that the food on offer will be as wonderful as the music. Although it’s something I do purely for leisure, I somehow have ended up with some little solo bits, though I’m a terrible violin player.

I’ll have more details about the in-studio session for Flirt FM after this Tuesday, but it should be available as a podcast or download after it airs, so I’ll update with a link to that as soon as it goes live. It’ll be just myself and piano in the studio, so it’ll be quite stripped down and intimate.

Behind the scenes: screenprinting the covers

The very lovely Grace Mitchell was in Lorg Fine Art Printmakers last Friday finishing off the screenprints for the handmade limited edition covers I’m sending out to the wonderful folk who funded my album. I tagged along, pretended to be helpful, but really just made coffee and shot some video footage and took some photos of the work in progress.

So, if you’ve ever been curious as to what a fine art print studio was like, here’s a little bit of a look inside the studio at Lorg. We were just screenprinting that day, but there was another artist in the studio doing some etching at the same time, which was interesting for me to watch as well, but I didn’t shoot any footage of that.

I’d done a little bit of screenprinting when I was studying art in secondary school myself, but this is on a whole other level by comparison, and was quite interesting to watch. I now have another batch of about 60 covers to assemble – which will take me a little while. But once they’re all made, editioned (numbered), and signed, they’ll be getting sent out. Nearly there at this stage. This is the home stretch of the CD making side of things.

The music I used in the video is bits of the piano instrumental “Bewerunge” that is up on my soundcloud too:

Checking out my music for the first time?

I put together a few tracks that are some of my own favourites, and give a good cross section of the different kinds of music I’ve explored so far. Some songs from my debut album Wires, (check out the web album liner notes version of that album too) and some of the instrumental piano work too.

I’m heading back into the print studio tomorrow with Grace, to finish screen printing the last batch of the funder’s edition of the album covers. Once that batch is printed and assembled, then I’ll be starting to post them out to the folk who helped fund the album recording last summer.

There’s a few more video recording shoots coming up in the next few weeks, all going to plan, and I can’t wait to see how those turn out. For these next two, I’m working closely with Galway based dancer Genevieve Ryan, who has been helping turn my ideas into actual video shoots. She’ll be dancing in one of the videos herself too. The next two songs that I hope to be shooting videos for are Phoenix and Codail Sámh, but I’ve been working on treatments for a few other songs off the record too, and hopefully will get around to shooting those videos this summer too. For one of those in particular, we might be looking to crowdsource some extras for the shoot, so keep an eye on this blog, and my twitter, facebook, or google+ page if you might be interested.

The videos are all being done with pretty much no budget, and just the time, energy and talent of people who want to come together to create something. It’s absolutely humbling that such talented people are giving their talent and time to these little projects of mine. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the next two videos turn out, but I’ll be doing updates about those shoots when they happen later this month.

Speaking of camera work, some bright-eyed fans of Ros Na Rún spotted that I had a tiny little part in an episode of the show last week. I’d almost forgotten about it myself, and missed it airing, but some people saw it, recognised me, and got in touch to tell me so. Sweet – thanks a million.

Wires album liner notes

I’ve been busying myself making the special funders edition version of the cd covers, but also putting together an online version of extended album liner notes here on the website. It’s one thing I’ve always loved about CDs and Vinyl records – being able to pore over the pages of lyrics while listening, or look at the photographs, see who the musicians are on each song, and read the little thank you notes. It’s something that’s less easy to do when you’re buying music digitally.

But with this online version I’ve put together, you can listen to the album in full, investigate songs individually and see the lyrics, musician credits, and read about the recording experience, or what inspired the song in some cases. There’s some photos from behind the scenes in the recording studio, in the printmaking studio, and now in the dancers studio too. Each page will be updated as more of the videos get shot and made available online, and I’m toying with the idea of putting up some music score parts for some of the songs in future as well. So, the liner notes are something that will hopefully continue to grow and develop over the next few months as I keep realising the “Wires” project fully and will then be a wonderful document of the record when it’s time to move on to the next project.

So, why not grab a cuppa, and Check out the liner notes as they are right now.

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