Hello, my name is Looptron.

Addiction Song [first draft]

feeling like a stranger
you've know forever
first time you've heard
these familiar words
a little bit of history
that never quite happened
a newspaper story
about nothing that matters
conversations about
past indiscretions
all the reasons I can't
look you in the eye
so many years since
I never met you
just a few hours
until you fly away


it took me an hour
to travel the distance
took me a day
to finally understand
the words we speak
quietly under cover
an instant photo
taken by your lover
in the half light I see you
stripped to the soul
in the half light I find myself
cursing it all
the changing tide
that brought you to me
the changing tide
that sweeps you away

don't take it away
this quiet addiction
I never expected

don't take it away
the silent addiction
that I walked right in to

Copyright ©2006 Neil Sharkey, all rights reserved.

Witch [first draft]

I ended the world
and the mountains
came tumbling down
and where they stood
an ephemeral army
sanctioned by the crown
picked me up
and carried me
all the way down
to the riverbank
forced me in
watched me drown

drown the witch
burn the witch

just a random idea
that occured to me
don't need an alibi
don't need clemency
just a page in a book
that I'm not gonna read
(what you think matters
makes no difference to me)
you're just a monster, a predator
without any teeth

Copyright ©2006 Neil Sharkey, all rights reserved.

Freesound Project

Got a nice note via MySpace from a very talented chap named Mike Hall (check out http://www.myspace.com/mikehallmusic - "The Train Tune" is especially good in my humble opinion). He says the following:

'lo

Just reading your blog an' ting.  I also had an idea to record various bits of ambience and stuff but came up against a small technical problem (no portable recording equipment... and the ambience on my office/studio isn't that interesting unless you're really into many small fans whirring away trying desperately to keep the processors working at anything like a respectable speed) so I had a bit of a hunt around the net and found this:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

You may already have heard of this site, but if not you might find some very strange/handy/odd/scary/relaxing noises on it.  The various mangled train sounds in the Train tune came off this site but I've also got some great percussion, outdoor ambience, etc.

Hope that's of some use.  Good luck with album and everything.  I know exactly what you're going through... <sigh>

regards
mike

The Freesound Project is a community effort to create a database of audio samples of, well, everything and make them available under a Creative Commons license so that everyone can use them. It's an amazing idea, and an exceptionally good call on Mike's part. Cheers matey!

 

14 days.

Woohooo. Now got a whopping 101 friends on MySpace. Wonder how many more I need before my album goes straight in at Number One (with a bullet!) like Arctic Monkeys did? Rather than requesting random "adds" off people I've been spending a couple of lunchtimes a week surfing profiles for music I enjoy and messaging them to tell them so. Oh, and a few randoms in sailor costumes. May as well try and get me an audience as well as do the networking part, eh?

Two weeks in and the writing is continuing nicely...rather amusingly, given all my weirdo electronica intentions, I've got three tunes that can be rendered entirely in acoustic form with no gadgetry and lots of open chords. Surprisingly enough this is really helps.... it means they're evolving a lot faster than the ones I need the computer for.

Also, the notebook is filling up with all sorts of weird ideas....like constructing a drum kit out of nothing but guitar noises. It's also occured to me to buy some sort of decent portable recording device so I can start sampling all the cool ambient noise I hear everyday.

(An aside: if anyone's reading this in Hatfield and can get me a sample of the smaller buses they used to run along Bishops Rise I'd be really grateful. Something in the engine did a lovely run of descending harmonics when they decelerated.)

Moving house this week, the mechanics of which are my least favourite thing ever. Packing. Heavy lifting. Kettle shopping. Urgh. Still.....it means I'll have a spare room in which to build my studio.

Potential Logo #1

Font: Bell MT (true type). Created in Corel PHOTO-PAINT.
Pros: No graphical elements (underline and pipe symbols included in font) so can be rendered in HTML.
Cons: Looks like it's been done before (but can't think where). Not sure I like serif fonts.

Popularity contest.

An important moment in musical history: The Looptron MySpace page has just reached the same number of "friends" as the Moeker MySpace page. :-)