I’ve posted this song before as an acoustic session but not the full version in all it’s glory.
Uni is drawing to a close, only 5 weeks left of the stuff really. The future holds all sorts of things, Summer internships in the big city with friendly people doing good work for interesting reasons, intensive courses to fulfill childhood ambitions, travels and adventures. But before I pave my way out of this beautiful corner of an island there things to do.
Couple of exams and essays of course, no surprises there. But the interesting stuff is still piling up. Things are in full swing for the second gig we are working on with Joe Bloggers (15th March, save the date!), I appear to be responsible for 200 people going skiing in a month which is exciting, I need to earn a few more quid at work to fund these hair brained schemes, 2 of my best friends are getting married in a few months and hot tubs need selling. I need to make this blog work harder to meet my unattainable demands that it be a shimmering power house of creative comment, a beacon in a sea of white noise and tumblr’d hype.
But first these essays need dispatching, things might be a bit quiet over the next 2 days but until then, here is BOY, they are phenomenal. They sing about gin, which reminds me of Song, By Toad.com but they don’t swear very much so the comparison is not complete.
Stumbled across a fantastic graphic designer yesterday and everyone should go check her out. This is hers below.
And so it is that each sunny moment stands high chance of bringing within me an appetite for being led outside and for being surrounded with hypnotic walking-pace rhythms, mixed with the ambient sounds of summer-like scufflings, circling round like flower shapes, each petal a piece of xylophone, melodic and sweet sounding yet solemn enough to incur the eery transformed cries of human excitement.
I’ve never been able to get enough of Seams‘ 2010-released EP, Tourist, never quite got the words. It’s just amazing, makes one feel really at one with urban-summer scenes and atmospheres. It’s an obscene feeling of escapism like no other that this EP gets in me. Beautiful. The above video features one of the four tracks on the EP.
Then there’s Focus Energy / Motive Order; a fine release that will stir your head around till it internally displays good-feeling correlations; that feeling that makes you want to move limbs around, dance. These are much more clean-cut mechanised tracks, they remind me of being alone in a big city for 3 days and turning up to “Im Rausch Mit Freunden Festival”, an event held in some fairly derelict and deserted cave in the forgotten-stretch of the city, and dancing for 3 hours straight - I was utterly sober and very lonely but somehow dancing seemed relieving. These tracks are somehow relieving.
Seams – Focus Energy
That review is for you, if you haven’t ever got round to listening to Jami Welch (aka Seams). There are many individuals though who, having listened to his 8-month-ago release, Focus Energy, might be curious to touch base with the guy – to see what’s going on and things.
So we did! Here’s a little quiz we gave Seams;
What are you currently doing?
Seams: I’m back in the UK for my graduation. But most of the time these days I’m at work at SoundCloud in Berlin.
How do you feel about your music at the moment?
I flip flop between hating it, and being really excited. Which I guess is pretty standard for most people. I have a lot less time to make stuff these days, so am trying my best to let go of my hangups about mixing etc, and to just make stuff quick and roughly, it’s much more fun than tweaking mixes for weeks.
Your release 8 months ago, Focus Energy and Motive Order, had more, let’s say, mechanical tendencies (i.e. ‘Tourist’ had a more ambient-noise feel) – in hindsight, what do you feel inspired this development?
I think I wanted make music similar to the music I like, rather than the music that came naturally. I’ve been trying to years to make sonically impressive ‘beats and bass’ stuff, but it’s never really worked. These two tracks seemed to the be closest I got to realising that aim. They were mainly driven by doing a bunch of live shows and wanting something a bit heavier that might get people to dance. I really dig that single, but doubt I’ll make something like it again, I seem to be heading back to ambient stuff at the moment.
This good-looking Seams Tote Bag that you’re selling with mp3s has the Seam/Lidl design, why the german supermarket?
It’s been a running joke for ages that I’m the ‘LIDL’s version of Four Tet‘, after I said it in one of my first interviews a few years ago. Also, now I’m based in Germany, there’s a lot more LIDLs. A friend did the design as a joke, but I quite like how they look!
Here at A Pocket Full Of Seeds HQ we do like a bit of the moody, atmospheric, melodic electronica. In fact we fucking love it. I can’t speak for George but from the muffled warps and audio scribbles I occasionally hear from his bedroom at home I reckon he probably fucking loves the stuff too
Arrange is a shining example of what turns me on musically. The album Plantation spins round on my iPod most days on the walk to campus and when I picked up word that the man is looking for funding to press his upcoming album onto vinyl I had no choice put to get stuck in!
If that’s your bag then go get it! For $14 (which is probably only about £3?) you can get an advance download of the new record and a 12″ limited edition vinyl copy. Feels good.
This woke me up today, about an hour after my other housemates. Having watched The Woman In Black last night (literally had to be restrained as I yelled and tried to climb over my seat) I was not totally happy with being the only person in the house, not for long with Hot 8 Brass Band. Being on your own in the house in the morning means you can pump this shit as loud as you need so that you can hear it everywhere. After that I just pretend I’m in an advert, make an extravagant breakfast with my shirt off and sing my head off to a completely different tune.
I have no idea if there has ever been an advert that resembles this morning’s routine, it wouldn’t be a great ad. But who cares? Today is a day for haircuts and assessed French presentations (La Chanson Française, est-elle mort dans la société française au-jour d’hui?), everything else is secondary.
