I’ve been almost been 2 months here in New York and I’ve happened to land right in the middle of a fairly interesting group of people, all of whom work in one way or another in fashion. The most special these people is a (cute) Spanish girl called Zahara Gallardo who is a (cute) graphic designer at Menage A Trois and a part time photographer. She plays around with video from time to time and recently made this cute little fashion film for magazine VNFold, and used a track of mine as soundtrack to these dark retro/futuristic images.

Video by Zahara Gallardo!
I should state that my involvement in this was just on the music front.

I have a list of projects here on a piece of paper: they are the projects that I am currently working on, and they are 12. You need three hands (which I don’t have) if you wanted to count them with your fingers - unless of you just use a single hand to count batches of five. So I’ve just spent the second night this week working through the night, watching progress bars crawl across my screen.

Once this period will be over I will have a few bits of nice work to show on here, but in the meantime I am posting a song I made last night during several rendering periods.

A Pret A Manger has opened directly beneath the studio, securing yet another brutal mark in the heart of Shoreditch. I feel ashamed to say that I love their coffees, and religiously buy one each morning before walking up through their staff back door into my office’s corridor; however the other night as I left work to head home I saw some perfectly hydrated youths urinating on Pret’s glass front door, and I couldn’t help but smile.

Leaving work late at night happens quite often, so I get to see a few interesting scenes on the street. For example I get to witness the progression of the “girl’s night out”: the night begins with the wonky-walking stilettos in heavy makeup, then gracefully moves on to wonky-walking with stilettos in hand, ending with sitting on the pavement, makeup splattered all over the face yelling obscenities at no-one in particular (or down the phone). The “boy’s night out” isn’t as glamorous and nowhere near as captivating.

Anyway, this track was inspired by such Shoreditch happenings, while the Pret A Manger logo glared at me from the reflections in the windows on the other side of the road. Ah, Shoreditch.

Working with video means you get to spend a lot of time waiting for things to render. Depending on the project, I’d say that no more than 40% of my time is spent editing, and the other 60% of my time is spent waiting the elements to render.

I’ve missed making music a lot over the past few weeks, so about two days ago I started on a new track. Nothing complicated, just an average down-tempo riff with a beat. So tonight, as I worked on bringing the Laz Wabit to life (and rendering) I decided to just finish the track off and upload it here.

Every track has a history and always brings back vivid memories of the period when you made it. I know that this track will always remind me of this incredibly stressful period in preparation for the Smoke The Monster Out tour.

I often play records together with my good friend (and now flatmate) Robbie on his decks in his tiny little bedroom. The other day, after playing straight for three or four hours, Robbie had lay down on the bed, exhausted, while I continued playing.

Banging techno isn’t really the most favourite thing for someone trying to sleep, but for Robbie it’s actually not that bad. In fact he often falls asleep listening to the sounds of Richie Hawtin and Anja Schneider. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to play something with a bit of warmth.

I like to think of this mix as an abstract representation of Robbie’s Sleep that day: it starts off low and warm as he’s drifting off, then gains pace while he’s fast asleep, and as he begins to wake up it ends with one of my favourite ‘morning tracks’.

10 days ago, while I was working at an ad agency in Soho, my laptop suddenly died and refused to come back to life. All my latest projects were on the computer and I hadn’t backed anything up (since my external hard drive also died on me just a few weeks earlier!). I won’t go into detail about this now, but it’s been a catastrophy: I lost the REBELRAVE project that I had been working on for the past two months. I had practically finished the video and just needed to export it to web format so that it could go live!

There may be a chance of me being able to recover my hard drive, but the guys at the data-recovery lab have been working on this for the past week without much success.

Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. The point is that because of all of this I just couldn’t do any work last week, so I came very close to having some time away from the computer to enjoy some thumb twiddling. I wasn’t too comfortable with this prospect, in fact I decided to learn Processing (watch this and this to see what it can do if you’re not familiar with it).
But I got interrupted after a day by an email about Radiohead’s remix contest. I immediately dropped my Processing project and got onto the case, using my friend’s laptop and his Ableton Live (thanks James).

So my remix is now up on radioheadremix.com. Have a listen below, and if you like it please vote!
I’ve titled it “Reckoner (Ripples mix)” as it focuses on the verse of the original song:
“Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore”

Just hit the vote button here:

And if you feel like taking part in this promotional stunt of mine, just copy and paste the following code into your own myspace/forum/blog!

update 29.09.08 15:01: I’ve just learned that the voting system blocks out multiple hits from a single IP, so if you’re in an office you probably won’t be able to vote if someone else in your office has already.

update 30.09.08 19:16: Over the last 10 days I have been receiving regular phone calls from the chap at the lab that were fairly negative about the recovery’s progress, however this morning’s phone call from him was the best news I’ve had in a long time. The data was saved!

The thing I love about all of this is that this whole story has taken me from one extreme to another, from total life crumbling desperation to a massive sense of achievement. But without the initial loss of my computer, I would have never been able to make the track, and instead would have had to work on my ongoing design and video projects. This track might seem like a small thing for most people, but those who are closest to me know how little time I’ve had to make music, and how frustrated I’ve been as it’s ultimately the thing I love doing the most.

update 31.09.08 13:53: I have my beloved laptop back, many thanks to Ian and Mark at Mac 1 - Spitalfields who spent many days fighting to recover the data.