We’re having a heatwave!
Yes folks, Manchester is as hot as Athens, if only for one day. Here’s the perfect track for baking in the sun: the blissed-out, beautific beats of Crookram. He’s from Holland, you know.
And another sun bathing track, Crookram – Sur La Route…
The album, Through Windows can be downloaded free from http://www.crookram.net/
See also:
The Avalanches-Halo’s and Heartstrings Mixtape
The Found Sound Orchestra-Once Round the Dancefloor and Home Mixtape
This is my shrine to Goldfrapp, videos I’ve made, mashups I’ve mashed and the odd remix. Enjoy!
My latest remix is Drew – Clockwork Mix, using just the vocal from the original and building a cinematic soundscape from ghostly whispers, ticking clocks and a huge orchestra.
This is one of the stand out tracks from Goldfrapp’s Tales of Us album, remixed by me, rocking the tribal flavour and adding a few angry mobs here and there. Sit back and grab a burning torch – it’s Thea, the Totem mix!
Nobody remixed Cologne Cerrone Houdini. So it was left to me to knock together a stoned sort of edit, using extracts from the track mixed into the instrumental with added samples and an interview with Alison which sums up the Seventh Tree era. It’s faster than the original and starts backwards! (This one contains cussin’ so it’s rated PG)
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Here’s some footage of Goldfrapp live in Manchester on the Head First Tour. The soundtrack was unusable, so I edited in a little remix of Beautiful, which should be their live standard. But isn’t.
The original version of Goldfrapp’s Winter Wonderland sounded unfinished. I finished it with a choir, bells and big drums. Tinkerbell meets Slade. I also added extra whistling and a quote from It’s a Wonderful Life at the end. I think it’s Animal from The Muppets on drums…
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Clowns is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Here’s my attempt at a music video, mixing tv performances from Seventh Tree with The Banana Splits, a children’s tv show from the 70s. I can explain. Clowns took me back to the Flake adverts of the 70s and my childhood. The Banana Splits are part of that nostalgia, and chime with Alison dressing up in a bunny costume during the playful Seventh Tree era. I opted for the balloon scene after Alison said the song was about breast implants… I used the instrumental version of Clowns and edited in just one line of the vocal, which I thought was poignant. There are also some vinyl scratches to complete the rose-coloured haze.
It was an accident, finding how well these two songs go together. I was making a compilation tape and as Black Cherry ended, Song to the Siren began. Within minutes I was mixing them together using the most primitive software I could find. Elizabeth Fraser was used sparingly as a backing vocal, allowing space for the vast emptiness of Black Cherry, until they build to a crescendo which compliments the main song. It’s quite hard to take two starkly beautiful songs like this and make them work together without ending up with Ballad Soup.
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Watch in HD, fullscreen!
Ok, he can’t really dance. Or read. But he was definitely funky.
Ever since reading Orlando the Marmalade Cat as a child, I wanted a ginger tom. Sparky was a rescue cat, and he was old when I got him. After six happy years with me, he became ill and passed away just before xmas 2010. It was a tough time, and shortly afterwards, I went to London. Staring out of my hotel room window, it really hit me that he was gone. I distinctly remember saying ‘Thankyou, Sparky. Thankyou for leaving me. Thanks a lot.’ Not my finest hour, but by a strange quirk, at that exact moment, underneath the planet in Oz, The Found Sound Orchestra were making a song out of heart strings, called ‘Thankyou 3 Times.’ Spooky! It’s the song that soundtracks my video, and I’m glad I had the forethought to record Sparky in glorious High Definition, during a blazing August sunrise in The Northern Quarter.
As Mrs. Madrigal says in Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives, ‘Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.’
(Please. Don’t send kittens.)
It’s been a few years but here’s a look back at my trip to the grooviest place on Earth. There’s a video to watch and you can click on any of the pictures for full size technicolour.
Officer Lovrin with his arresting good looks…
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I made this as a tribute to The Found Sound Orchestra, who make great tunes out of bits of old records from junkshops. I decided to make a video using the same collage technique, and trawled YouTube for bits of found footage. The young people call it a video mash-up. The 2001-style time tunnels are my own creation, as are the platform boots and the lips…I was born in the sixties. Babyfood was obviously different then.
Check out The Found Sound Orchestra and download all their music for nothing! It’s perfectly legal. And the best tunes this side of a mojito and a sun lounger. If nothing else, try Memorabilica…
“Its the sound of the sun shining that little bit brigher. Its the sound of butterflies in Spring time. Its the sound made by soft toilet tissue on a smooth bottom. Its a sound you remember but have never heard before. Its the sound of three hundred and forty two records, tapes and found sound recordings being played over the top of one another.”
Press play and brighten your day.
Getting Closer (to the End) – The Found Sound Orchestra
You might also like- Found Sound Orchestra Mix – Once Round the Dancefloor and Home
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© My artwork, photography and music are copyright Mark Wallis 2015
You may download and save my material but not redistribute without clear credit or a link back to The Vibes.
Music mixes containing copyright material owned by others are included here under Creative Commons License and no infringement is intended.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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