Sat, 29 August 2009
Playing With the Past is an annual (we hope) event at the Edinburgh
Film Festival where contemporary bands are invited to write new
soundtracks for old films. Last year was the first of these, when the
superb British Sea Power wrote a brilliant score for Man of Aran, a (slightly fake) documentary about the lives of the inhabitants of a remote island off the West Coast of Ireland (extract here).
This was such a success that the band have been performing it all over the place ever since. This year David Drummond, who put the event together, decided to invite three different bands to work with roughly half an hour or so of footage each, and he started off by inviting eagleowl, who suggested a number of other bands, from which David chose FOUND and Meursault. We decided not to include more than a few excerpts of the music in this because the bands were a little uncomfortable about listening to too much of their stuff in the absence of the film to which it belongs. So a big thank you to Tommy, Bart and Neil for coming in to talk about their music, and to David and Theresa from the Filmhouse who came by to chip in at the beginning, before having to rush off. It may not be the catchiest of podcasts in a musical sense this week, but I think this is easily one of the best podcasts we've done - one of the most interesting, certainly. Also, although I haven't tracked down all these films on the internet, I have got some bits and pieces for you to give you an idea of what was going on. Confusingly, they all have the original scores on these clips, but erm... well, hopefully you'll find them instructive. The Films: Toadcast #84 - The Playing With the Pastcast
|
Sat, 22 August 2009
Would you believe that this podcast is finished and ready and done and I am ready to go to bed by 10pm. This is a fucking scarily strange occurrence. I've only had about four beers too, which is also a little unsual. The only organisational task at which I have abjectly failed is keeping the length of this podcast down to an hour. Basically, having different people co-present is really nice, and I think it makes the podcasts miles better, but I am still coming to terms with the discipline of keeping the talky talky down to a manageable level and sticking to that hour which has made these weekly swear-morsels so digestible in the last few months. At the Wickerman Festival
Callum from Meursault made the highly contentious statement that not
all funk music was buttock-clenchingly awful and, whilst I mocked him,
I decided that someone with that kind of crazy recklessness must be
brave enough to bring a Toadcast full of funky classics to an audience
of sulky, morose indie kids with art school fringes. So good luck to
Callum - I am going to be listening to this with the same curiosity as
the rest of the audience I would think. It's hard to get a handle on
what a podcast sounds like as you record it, so I guess if I am going
to absorb the lesson of the funk then I will have to have a cup of
coffee, put my feet up on the couch and listen to it the same as
everyone else. 01. Parliament - Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker) (06.23) |
Mon, 17 August 2009
The most enormous difficulty with recording this podcast was that it was monumentally, wonderfully, amazingly sunny and hot outside. So there we were, stuck in our house, trying to play songs and conduct an interview while we were all secretly (and not so secretly) longing to just be out in the back garden. Mrs. Toad was making burgers, you know. Gaaaaah! I remember when FOUND recorded a show with Marc Riley recently and I got plenty of emails saying that they really weren’t very talkative. Which is odd really, because I didn’t entirely get that kind of impression as we recorded this session or about them in general, but then I listen back to it again and the first few interviewy segments really do take a while to get going. I guess it took a while for Ziggy (who I’d never met before) and myself to figure out exactly how to talk to one another and whether or not we really got on. So that whole dynamic makes for a really good podcast, which gets more and more interesting, from my point of view anyway, as the thing progresses. As usual, all the videos are embedded below and can be seen at the Song, by Toad Vimeo on YouTube pages, along with a portfolio of photos by Dylan from Blueback Hotrod, and Fee on Flickr here. The session tracks can all be downloaded below, and the main interview podcast itself is immediately below. Have fun Toadlings. I am going to sleep like a freshly-slaughtered corpse. Toadcast #83 – FOUND Toad Session FOUND – Mullokian (Toad Session) FOUND – You’re No Vincent Gallo (Toad Session) FOUND – Anti-Climb Paint (Toad Session) Now we’ve got the main session video below, followed by the videos we made for the individual songs (Vimeo are being fucking useless at the moment, but eventually that main video and Gifted won’t be on YouTube). 01. FOUND – Mullokian (Toad Session) (05.11) |
Sat, 8 August 2009
Helloooo people. This morning the Toadcast comes to you from Leith. There were beers and there was a fuckload of incoherent rambling, and it ran way over time but, erm, who really cares? This week I went to visit my crippled friend Steven (v? ph?) Kearney in Leith and we recorded a podcast in his house prattling on about all the usual nonsense. He got all jumpy about sound quality, omitting to mention the fact that the Toadcasts are the most incredibly badly recorded show on the interwaves. Honestly, why would this week be the one single week it suddenly didn't sound like shit? Still, Steven has recently started his own podcast, leading on from his Fresh Air show Dylan and the Mule. It's only one episode down, but it sounds very promising indeed, so with a bit of luck there could be very good things coming from that part of the world this year. Me, I just desperately need a sleep. Night night Toadlings. I will probably be gawping at the wonderful Cybraphon by the time you read this. With a hangover. 01. Withered Hand - No Cigarettes (06.56) |
Sat, 1 August 2009
When we were out in Italy on our holidays Mrs. Toad and I had very few CDs with us but one of them was an Uncut compilation of prison blues and murder ballads which, amazingly, given the very promising subject matter, really wasn't very good. In fact, it was rotten, so I've made a podcast based on the self same concept, but with what I personally think are vastly better songs. Most obviously, to my mind, there were very few contemporary songs in there, and I thought that was a little weird. Now, I actually think that the level of political commentary in popular music is just a little weak at the moment, but there are nevertheless some amazingly good prison and criminal justice-related songs to be had, and certainly some exceptional murder ballads, although I must confess that the most recent bit of genuine social commentary here pre-dates the 1990s by a couple of years. There was probably more recent material I could have used, it just didn't spring to mind at the time I'm afraid. So here we have the Jailcast, complete with some largely incoherent ranting about politics and my own stupid fucking jail story which Mr.s Toad takes such delight in sniggering about at every available opportunity, the bitch. It's not that exciting, really it isn't. 01. Tom Waits - Jockey Full of Bourbon (02.05) |
