Tag Archives: Sparklehorse

August 1, 2014 · 8:16 pm

Sea Song and other fictions….the album.

Sea Song Project

I can now report that my third musical venture has landed. ‘Sea Song and other fictions’ is available to buy and download from my Band Camp page. You can find it here.

Logo

I have written an epilog / postmortem /sleeve note for the project which has its own page here . I hope this goes some small way to explain the project.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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February 16, 2014 · 11:13 am

Ocular Cents (The Ghost Of The Horse Orbits Altair 4)

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Another piece of music reached some sort of conclusion yesterday. It’s very much a mashing up of two distinct intents. In the first instance I had been playing with the chords from Eyepennies, one of my favourite Sparklehorse songs, the other being some play time with the new Korg Gadget app on iPad.

Korg Gadget has 15 retro style synthesizers and drum machines and the ability to record loops, multitrack, and scene sequences. It can be power hungry and I have found a limit to the capability on my V2 iPad of 3 simultaneous gadgets.

Crashing guitars are made with iRig and Amplitube

Thrown in over these two elements is the Theremin recently launched by Femur Design. That was the catalyst to head into space. The Theremin was  a huge influence on soundtracks for 50s/60s/70s sci-fi movie and TV soundtracks and bought to mind one of my favourite movies from that period, The Forbidden Planet, which is referenced in the title and theme of this song. The Theremin is played ‘live’ through Amplitube. In the absence of Ableton Live this is all assembled in Garageband.

So here it is in its full 7 minute journey into the deep space twinkly droneiness.

Im quite keen to produce a video for this but I’m currently a little uncertain how to collect original source material with out warp capability. Might call Jade Rabbit for a collaboration.

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January 6, 2012 · 6:44 pm

Sparklehorse Live

Evenin’ All

I hope this finds some ears.

I thought that Sparklehorse ROIO’s where as rare as Sparklehorse droppings but thanks a recent reactivation of my D’a’D account I found three. This is a lush French FM from around the time of “It’s A Wonderful Life’. It’s wonderful and melancholic.

It was so sad that Mark Linkous took a shot gun to his heart. I hope his last unreleased album surfaces eventually. Everything he did was touched with wonder.

Sparklehorse
La Cigale – Paris
October 15th 2001
FM – France Inter

Setlist
———–
1-Wonderful life
2- Apple Bed
3- Sea of teeth
4- Piano Fire
5- Eyepennies
6- Saturday
7- Weird Sisters
8- Sunshine
9- Morning hollow
10- Ghost in the sky
11- Yellow birds
12- Pig
13- Devil’s new
14- Homecoming Queen
———–
Total : 63min

Broadcast on french radio France Inter on Bernard Lenoir’s program.

Sparklehorse – La Cigale – Paris

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July 23, 2011 · 8:20 pm

Sparklehorse II (Subtitle – Death)

By any measure of a day, today has been pretty appalling. At breakfast time we had the horrific massacre in Norway. Whilst still to be confirmed a lone right-wing fundamentalist dogma laden individual slaughtered over 90 innocent people. At lunch time we had an update on the nigh on 1,000,000 people forced into awful refugee camps in Somalia, crushed by starvation, emaciated infants unable even to wail their pain in a man made hell, and then by evening a once promising songstress dead by her own addictions and the pressure of fame, pawed over by flag waving ‘fans’ and the ever-present carrion press.

The coverage of all these terrible tragedies has been wholly unpleasant in its fawning to the four horsemen on the media. News International may be under the spot light but as a society we get the media we crave (apparently). I tend to think it’s a 50/50 relationship. In some instances we are told that what we are seeing is popular and we go with the flow, in others we react and substantiate an idea that we didn’t hold in the first place.

Our world is increasingly unpleasant and it’s not surprising that some of us chose the emergency exit.

For any number of random connections this brings me back to Mark Linkous or Sparklehorse as he named his musical output. I had such a huge appreciation of the man and his music when he was alive. He was an apparently emotionally frail man with obsessive tendencies and was a long-term drug user. He died by his own hand, shooting himself through the heart in a back alley in Knoxville, Tennessee. A committed act however you look at it.

Here are two films that include conversation with him.

The second is from a BBC Culture Show program

Good quality live recordings of Sparklehorse are as rare as Sparklehorse droppings but the following link will let you find 17 songs, variously outtakes & others. A track listing won’t help. It is what it is, an addition to a limited body of work by a unique musical voice.

Sparklehorse – Outtakes & Others

Lets all cross our fingers that tomorrow is full of puppies, kittens & pretty flowers. I tend to doubt it.

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