Archive for the ‘Fans’ Category

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Edna Reviews – Stereograms

August 21, 2012

Edna reviews the Magic Eye experience.

Magic Eye - Very much of the 1990s. Just like Star Trek: TNG. Dodgy special effects all around.

CAN YOU SEE THE ROMULANS?

20 long, bitter years Edna has waited to be able to see a magic eye picture mystically swirl into a 3D extravagance.

I recall being a young child and being taunted by my father on a family holiday in Devon.

“Can’t you see the Romulans? It’s amazing! What wrong with you freak? You’re no child of mine.”

Many years passed. Edna grew up… The bitter memories passed and jumbled with other bitterness.

Child

Enda now has a child of her own.

Edna had forgotten the trauma, until this weekend arrived, when the same god forsaken Star Trek magic eye picture was presented.

Seconds

Incredibly, within seconds the purple blogs did NOT swirl into anything special.

But Edna DID see the magic eye Romulans (20 years wait over)!

And what a sodding let down, why did Edna bother? What was Enda bitter for so long for?

Waiting

20 years of waiting, amounted to something that would probably have impressed Edna less 20 years previous. What would have been worse? Knowing how shit it was 20 years ago? Or waiting and not knowing?

Frustratingly, her own daughter had no issues seeing it immediately, she was also unimpressed.

Warping

Edna will have to find another way to warp her daughter for 20 years.

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Writing Process

August 15, 2012
Image

THE OHCHEERS® METHOD™

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Boring Festival Fan

June 10, 2012

http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/

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gUiLLeMoTs – Hello Land!

May 10, 2012

Where have the Guillemots been recently? The British avant-garde beat combo absconded from the UK scene to write and record a new album in a mere fortnight. In Norway.

Completely unannounced till just a couple of days ago, Hello Land! has been made available for instantaneous free streaming via the marvel that is Soundcloud. And here it is…

Oh, and did you know that this is planned to be the first of four LPs in 2012? They’re going to be loosely based around the seasons.

No pressure then. I mean, hey, the Beatles chucked out 2 albums a year at peak.

Away from the limiting and highly-structured commercial music industry of the big labels, it seems to me they’ve rediscovered their experimental roots. Initial impressions of Hello Land! are of a luscious but not unsophisticated lightness.

It is a departure from the hit-single focused efforts that has perhaps held Guillemots back in recent years (in this writer’s humble opinion). They’re not trying too hard to be something they’re plainly not. Not until they’re ready to take over the world.

(What a horribly cynical reason to make music. But baby needs shoes, right?)

Looking back on Guillemots’ output, following an erupting romantic rush of excitement felt within debut Through The Windowpane, its successors Red and Walk The River were somewhat staid affairs overall and never quite met up to the delirious bombast of their first release.

Fyfe Dangerfield has explained the rationale behind the departure from the traditional music biz mould as follows:

I was just a bit lost in the music industry, you can get very lost in the music business. It’s not like I hate the music industry. I think it’s just you can get very immersed in it without even realising and there are so many patterns and waves that you expect to do things. I think we were just used to playing the line without realising. The one thing we were really getting frustrated by was this album cycle.

You generally spend a few months at a time making a record and then you kind of sit on them for a time. It’s very hard to be creative, I think we started realising we don’t need to do this. We thought why not put out loads of music and do it ourselves!

You can support the band by giving them your money and buying their CD or MP3/WAV downloads by clicking this link:

http://guillemots.greedbag.com/buy/hello-land-0/

What’s that you say? A fiver for a whole album? I remember when non-chart CDs were £16.99 in the Rock ‘n’ Pop section of HMV back in the mid 1990s, when I were a teenager.

Oh, just whilst I remember, Guillemots are also headlining our pals’ festival 2000 Trees this year.

http://www.efestivals.co.uk/news/12/120413c.shtml

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Sonic Astronic

April 10, 2012

facebook.com/SonicAstronic
soundcloud.com/SonicAstronic
sonicastronic.com

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Sonic Astronic

January 25, 2012

If you’re available in London this Saturday, 28th January, 2012, the Main Protagonist has a cheeky little recommendation if you fancy a GIG:

Sonic Astronic meld electronic soundscapes and live humans.

It’s been suggested they sound like Four Tet – albeit with Mick Jagger on vocals, Hooky on bass, and with a world music percussion section.

Sonic Astronic bathe their audience in audio: shimmering guitars; delicate but intense hypnotic rhythms; a fusion of electronica, earthy beats, tremendous crescendos and tender moments.

GET HERE. LISTEN HEAR.

TOWER TAVERN – Saturday 28th January – 8pm

Very near the BT tower.

21 Clipstone Street, W1W 6BA

Warren St / Goodge St tubes

CLICK HERE TO VISIT FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE, HERE. OR HERE. TAKE CARE TO HEAR.

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Sonic Astronic @ Smugglers Festival

September 1, 2011

Our new music project – Sonic Astronic*, whose delicious new musics you can review on Soundcloud – is set to perform on both days Sunday evening (possibly Saturday as well – TBC) at the Smugglers Festival in Deal, Kent.

Sonic Astronic live at Smugglers Festival 2011

The best way to spend the last weekend of the summer!

Meantime, ohcheers.com image geezer beak has taken a day out of his busy regime of “giving up” on all matters pertaining to creativity in order to furnish us with some draft images…

Gritty & Moody

Less traumatic, instead aquatic

*Sonic Astronic was

(or should it be were?)

formerly known as

freaksforever

in a previous incarceration

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Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011 – Retrospective Overanalysis in Mime with a Wedge of Lime

August 29, 2011

Edinburgh Fringe Postcard (beak says: "click to see details - love from beak xx")

When visiting the Fringe, you have to let it wash over you, accepting it for the disorienting wave of human brain-detritus that it is. There is simply too much to take in from all the various hilariants and infinite, unstoppable untertainment.

Such visceral wonders; those unerring wits; and thy hyper-hypheny-pretentious types too – the irredeemables – and my, how they shall pay.

Whatever. This post attempts to capture the Main Protagonist’s 4-day visit at the Festival‘s tail end.

Image man beak has helpfully provided a delicious photographical compilation/complication above, in the form of a tastefully-concocted mashup postcard, although since giving up he personally neglected to join us this time (cheers beak – Ed).

There were allegedly something like 2500 shows on offer throughout August, and whilst it’s a good idea to book some stuff in advance, for some of it you just need to go with the buzz.

Below is a brief run-through from memory of what happened (hover over links to see comments if you like; don’t bother if you can’t be bothered)…

Of course a lot of other stuff happened in those four days, but if it were committed to publication we only lay ourselves open to litigation, don’t we? And we don’t want that, do we? No. (Yes.)
————
POST-PUBLICATION POST-SCRIPT NON-SEQUITUR EDIT
beak contributes:

(Kind of) Blue

Thanks beak. Thanks a lot.
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David Firth: Artistic Polymath

June 27, 2011

Why is it, right, that some people who you already know to be talented in a particular, hm, let’s say ‘business sector’, then go and astound you with something in a somewhat distinct creative realm?

And so it transpires, y’see, that David Firth, the visionary* behind various ominously surreal (and mostly exceptional) cartoon shorts – perhaps most (in-) famous of which is his creation of Salad Fingers, but this author’s current favourite is Jerry Jackson: Life & Death – also produces some quite wonderfully attention-grabbing audio under the guise of Locust Toybox.

Of course, we’ve all known about Firth’s musical ‘dabbles’, but one has to wonder how many people recognise quite how deviously exquisite the sounds of Locust Toybox actually are.

And here we are, sitting at the temporal coordinates after which Locust Toybox alleges to be on its 9th album: Noon. It was released at some point this year (twenty-eleven, common era; dunno exactly what day or time) and it’s hosted for FREE DOWNLOAD from Firth’s site. It even has an album cover:

Locust Toolbox - Noon

Firth’s never been too quiet about his musical interests. In his animated work, strains of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada have been stitched into the soundscape of his cartoons since Fat Pie’s earliest days.

However, aside from the similarity to the playfulness to those two artists, the sound of Noon recalls a less bleak Autechre; a more propulsive Freescha. Some of the atmospherics even bring to mind touches of Avalanches or even Orbital. Maybe also a hint of, er, Hint.

It’s as if there are all these organic-sounding squirgles, played by humanised machinery with broken-down minds, trying to fix themselves.

This author IS going to stop trying to describe this music now, cuz as the cliché quite accurately states, what is the point of dancing about architecture?

All you need to know is that iTunes states it is Scribblepop, and that’s good enough for this protagonist.

Look, it’s free. Download it. Stick it on yer iDevice and plug in yer ears. If you like it, share it with all yer social notworking fandangles and let’s see if we can get it played on the radio.

If you’re feeling flish – or even flush – donations are accepted over Paypal.

(Oh, and yeah we realise that just because someone can do TWO things rather well, well, that doesn’t exactly make them a polymath. Perhaps a duomath? But it’s art, not math. Perhaps duoart? I’m leaving the title as it is though. Whoever said journalism was a representation of truth?)

*Doesn’t that sound terribly pompous? It’s fun to ascribe questionable attributes sometimes, isn’t it?

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Elizabeth Taylor: OUR NUMBER ONE FAN

March 24, 2011

The Main Protagonist has been very busy of late. Busy how? Busy with business. As he is a Business Analyst and all-round wordy git this makes him etymologically sound. He just wishes he sounded sound with his sounds. What sounds? That sound of woe as his favouritest gay icon, and mother of another gay icon, has snuffed it due to overdosing on husbands and – shock after shock! – reading too much ohcheers.com.

The lovely and seemingly-infinite-lifespan Liz Taylor wasn’t as much of an Animatronic (TM) as we had either thought, hoped or dreamed. She got snuffed out by the cruel hand of the finite.

As a tribute, let us remember Liz Taylor as she'd want to be remembered. Of course, as she enjoyed browsing ohcheers.com whilst on a rare tea break, whilst volunteering at the RNLI call centre in Burundi. Get Well Soon Lizzy-T, from all at ohcheers.com xoxoxox

Two thousand, one hundred and forty-seven of her husbands were weeping and too tear-torn for comment. The rest just didn’t pick up their phones or had changed their numbers. Or had changed their names.

Wishful thinking may make the world go around, but nothing’s gonna bring back the brave ole dame now. Not even the tragic moans of her only daughter and fellow homo legend, Drew Barrymore, whose only remark to ohcheers.com was:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to call the police. Right now. Get off my doorstep. Go on Viper, kill! Kill!

The tape from our erstwhile reporter stops dead at this point, but it’s unsurprising that people act in such deep denial amidst such trauma and upset. Keep strong, Drew. We’re here when you’re ready.

We’re always ready.

Ready for you, Drew. Who?

The lovely Liz will be laid to chill out with the daisies at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in the next few hours. She will shortly be accompanying fellow snuffs Micky “Michael” Jackson and Clarke “Green” Gables to see what comes next in the great mysterious scheme of life.

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