sketches

Just wondering why people madly rush for music festival tickets these days. 110.000 tickets/130.000 have been sold in 45 min for a festival I often go to. 45 minutes! And moreover tickets get more expensive year after year and most of the time the prices are just highly indecent. Well I’m not gonna pay 150$ to see Leonard Cohen… Festival tickets for less than 100$ become the exception… God where do people find their budget to go to festivals all along summer?

The Holga is a particular analog camera. The trick about this tool is that its interests resides in its imperfections… What imperfection and why? It’s not difficult to answer that. Every part of this camera is made of plastic, from the lens to the shutter. So it has a lot of lens “aberrations”, distortion, color saturation and so on. Oh and when it gets a little old, you can have light leaks. One characteristic feature of a holga photograph is the vignetting. As you can see on the image, the edges are darker than the center. And the colors: holga likes the skies and is providing magnificient blue tones.

But it’s not always easy to make a nice holga shot: because it needs a tone of light and is sometimes very approximate in focus, plus there’s just one shutter aperture and speed.

But when everything is set up, you can have some great results and effects you can’t get with another regular camera. If I had more budget for it, I would shoot a lot more holga pictures. But as it uses 120mm it’s quiet expensive to process.
Here’s a picture I did when traveling Japan, it was taken in Nara, one of Japan ancient capitals.

On saturday I’ll play live with my new project, it’s going to be the first time I’ll play most of these songs in concert and the first time I’ll play them with a whole live band. So I’m really excited and nervous as well. (Of course) we did a middle-average-maybe-bad rehearsal on tuesday but we still have one tonight. But as one says: bad last rehearsal means good gig. Well maybe it’s psychological: if you play really bad on the last rehearsal, you’re 200% concentrated during the gig because you know you can f*** up the song real bad, so you’ve got this strength to survive… By playing really bad, I mean you know the songs because you played them a million times but can’t help being bad.
Anyway we’ll be 6 on stage, not necessarily everyone at the same time: electric guitar, drums, bass, acoustic guitar, keyboards, discrete laptop, alto saxophone for one song…
I can’t wait to be on saturday, because I haven’t played live for a long time, recording and recording again in my own intimate little world… We still have a general rehearsal tonight, so that’s nice. Maybe that’s going to make me cool down a little bit.

Fender Rhodes are highly considered among keyboardists. Since its commercial release in 1965, it has never left the modern music arsenal, from jazz to folk, from rock to electronica. Every synth that tries to imitate it can come close to its sound, but not totally mimic it.

It has this mix of mild medium sounds and bright glockenspiel-like textures that makes it useful for a lot of styles. Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock used it a lot in jazz. In folk-rock music, mixing it with acoustic guitars is always creating a nice effect. In alternative rock, Radiohead makes an extensive use of this instrument for example.

Technologically, we can understand why it sounds the way it does: a hammer hits a tine - very likely the kind of tine you find in a glockenspiel - and the sounds is captured by magnetic pickups, the very same technology you find on electric guitars.

I don’t own a Rhodes myself, because until a few months ago it wasn’t manufactured anymore. But the studio in which I’ve recorded owns one, so I was lucky to be able to put onto tape the “real thing”. So otherwise I’m using the virtual instrument devoted to it on my garageband and I have to say that it sounds really good and close to the real instrument. Most of the time, I would not be able to tell the difference, it’s when you hit the notes hard for example that you hear that it’s a fake one… So it’s kind of my Rhodes for the poor… By the way I’m still amazed of the sound quality of garageband instruments, as this software is already integrated when you buy your mac.

Time to shoot again! Nice light, nature waking up, every spring makes me going out with my cameras… Not that I don’t shoot regularly, but as I’m shooting partly with lomography’s lca and holga and they need a lot of light for good results, spring’s the time.

The digital vs analog photography war is most of the time really funny to me. Of course digital is user-friendly, easy to handle, cheaper to reveal because there’s no film process. But: I can tell the difference between a digital and an analog picture just by watching it a few seconds. I’ve made a blindtest and I had 10/10. Not that my eye is particularly good, but there’s a real difference. Digital still is cold to me and not yet at the top of what it could be. Analog is warm, organic and there’s this grain that you can’t find in any expensive digital camera. And I don’t feel like spending a whole lot of time behind my computer screen for post-production and analog imitating.

One day analog photography will just be history and then I’ll have to buy a digital camera… For now I think that digital photography still has to get better. When digital is really competing with analog, then maybe I’ll buy a digital cam… Though I love my Nikon F90, lca, holga (this amazing medium format cam made entirely of plastic) and so on.

Here’s a bunch of photographs I’ve taken on the highway a few weeks ago, around 6.30 pm…

Here’s a track from a french musician called Colleen. It is made with music boxes loops mainly, it’s very atmospheric and relaxing, classic music sounding and experimental at the same time. It’s from a EP called “les Boîtes à musique”.

Here’s a live version of Damien Rice’s Rootless Tree, that he recorded for a tv channel. This song is from his second record, called “9″. It shows Damien Rice’s music at his best: cool songwriting, deep interpretation, for a very emotional result.

Ok, we don’t feel like listening to Damien Rice anytime, because it’s mostly sad songs and of course it’s not suited for any occasion. But listening to his 2 albums, it’s clear that there’s not a lot of stuff to get rid of - if any - because he can write and interpret songs with a real intensity and authenticity that you don’t find a lot anywhere else.

His way to build his career is also quite interesting and honest. He recorded and mixed himself his 2 albums, recording at various places and houses. Once again this “Do It Yourself” road that we’re used to hearing a lot these days but here there’s nothing to do with marketing and the way to sell an artist.

The production and recording work in “9″ is really better than what he did in “0″, but the songs in “0″ have such a quality that you soon forget about this lack of recording and mixing techniques that would have made it a “classic” album, so to speak.

There’s a rumor saying that the new Wim Wenders movie will be presented in Cannes. Called the Palermo shooting, starring Dennis Hopper and Milla Jovovich… One of the greatest contemporary directors in my opinion. Paris, Texas, the Million Dollar Hotel, The Wings of Desire are among my favourite movies ever.

I’ve just seen “Shine a light” yesterday. Whether you like the Rolling Stones or not, if you like rock music it’s a nice experience. Beautifully shot, edited and most of all mixed: like when a cam’s getting close from a musician, the sound of him increases. I think it’s one of the coolest thing about the movie.

I think it has what I’d call the rock’n'roll soul all along: this thing that you feel about rock creating deep emotions, this thing that made me want to make rock music in the first place I guess. When you feel music from your chest flowing all around your body… Well that’s it for the limbic explanation, at least for today

And cool end by the way, maybe the only cgi manipulation in the movie that we’re aware of.

“Living well is the best revenge”
This quote from a middle age philosopher has been borrowed by R.E.M. as a song title. I wish I had discovered it before, as it would be a great album title… And I’m quietly thinking about a title for my album…