Week 8 - Absolute, Uncertain Chaos

Hello, welcome back!

I hope everyone is being safe especially with everything that’s going on. It’s been a crazy week. I honestly think the chaos is just starting, and to be honest, it’s getting quite scary.

Chaos is a really interesting concept for me. It’s a concept that Florence Welch also finds really intriguing, and there’s quite a few quotes of hers which I love about chaos. The lyric which really resonates with me is; “Maybe I’ve always been more comfortable in chaos” from ‘St. Jude’, which is a brilliant song, 101%, would recommend. I might do an article about Florence, or about chaos, it’s something I could go on about. There’s also a quote of hers which says: “I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe. It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you're either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear”. It fills me with a lot of joy, and peace actually, which is why I adore her, and her music.

Anyway, university buildings have started to close, including all studios, rehearsal spaces, and equipment rentals. Below is a video of the control room in one of our studios, and possible the last time I'm going to ever be in one, which is so sad, it feels like the end of an era.

It’s for the safety of everyone, and it’s the right decision, it just means finding a way around these things. Assignments are changing, life is changing, and I think a lockdown is imminent, in my opinion. Please, everyone, stay safe, and look after your loved ones. Also remember to be kind, and considerate.

This obviously meant that this week is a little different, and the coming weeks will also be different. But there’s still tons of stuff to do, so let's get on.

ALLORA

The final video was finally finished this week, which meant that I could post the promotion video on Wednesday, and the final video on Friday! I’m so happy. I’m really proud of it, it took some working out so that I could use it on every platform, but the final video was over 19 minutes, so it couldn’t go on IGTV unfortunately, but I posted it on YouTube, and then put a link to it on each of my social media channels. I’ve got 12 views so far, however I’m planning on continuing to post on all my socials, so that people will see my profile a lot more, and will keep clicking the link. I think some promotion from the ALLORA account will hopefully help too as they have a lot more followers than I do.

I’ve begun work on the next video, which is Caty’s one-on-one interview, hopefully this should be out within the next two weeks. I’m unsure as to whether I’m going to continue with the meme-editing, as I think it works better on the group videos.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to film any more group videos before the photography studio at uni closed, but I did manage to film all of the one-on-one interviews, so I still have ALLORA things to do and to post. So watch out for the next interview….it’s on it’s way.

Songwriting/Personal Artistry

I got back on the writing train this week. I tried to take inspiration from the artists I love and the writing styles I love and want to write like. So this week I wrote a song in the style of Lily Allen’s ‘No Shame’ album, which I’ve been playing a lot recently. Her lyrics on this album are very conversational and contain a lot of idioms, as well as still being quite clever and witty, being the same Lily we’ve come know and love. The song I wrote is called ‘Lost and Found’ and can be found (haha) on the lyric page here. I wrote a couple of different verses and chorus’ of a few different songs in the ‘No Shame’ style as well, but not full songs.

I also wrote a song called ‘You’, which was inspired by an old voice recording of a melody I found on my phone. This can also be found on the lyric page here. I’ve recorded a rough vocal for it, but it needs to be produced and mixed. I’m aiming to get onto this in the near future and sit down for a few days, just produce everything I’ve got so far, and post it, once I’ve caught up on some of my other work.

I also started a song called ‘Let’s Talk’, and I wanted to play around with the ideas of ‘surviving’, and ‘full circle’ - which was a possible title for an EP which I was doing, but have now chosen to delay, until I’m ready to do an EP, for now I’m experimenting, and finding what works for me.

I’m also really getting into Clairo (the ultimate bedroom-pop queen) at the moment, and I’m going to try and write some songs in Clairo style next week. I think vocally, we’re quite similar, so I’m excited to start that and see how it turns out.

I also purchased a condenser microphone so that I can still do some recordings at home, here’s my little set up: It’s not the same as studio settings obviously, but it fits in well with my bedroom-pop/DIY aesthetic, and it does the trick.

I do also need to start creating content of just what I’m doing day to day, I'm just trying to figure out exactly what I want to do, but expect more time-lapses for definite.

Performance

Performance work was a bit hectic this week. I was very aware that the rehearsal spaces were going to shut on Monday, and I was so worried that we didn’t have any recordings of our rehearsals. We were originally planning to rehearse on Friday at Blueberry Hill Studios (one of our rehearsal spaces) which was still planning to be open, but on Wednesday they decided to close. At this point, I was slightly panicking. I knew we couldn’t get any equipment out at uni (including microphones), but the rehearsal space at uni was still open. So I contacted everyone on Thursday when I found this out, and asked everyone to come in on Friday morning to get what we could, recorded. Luckily, my angel of a flatmate had a Shure SM58 which she let me borrow for the rehearsal. My guitarist had already gone home for safety reasons, but my bass player (another angel) said she would bring her guitar, and she filled in for him. She did amazingly, she picked each song up really quickly, and we got some good takes with the piano, backing singers, and guitar.

Obviously that meant that we now don’t have bass on the recordings, but they sounded okay without, and it’s a recording we can work with. I might post some on the demo page, we'll see, I'll let you know if I do though.

However, with my final performance now cancelled, it’s going to make our performance assignment a little bit more complicated, and not anywhere near the original performance I had planned. But these things happen, it’s for the safety of everyone, and we’ll work with what we’ve got. Luckily I’ve got an amazing band, who are all in a similar position so I’m sure we’ll be just fine.

That’s it for now! As I’ve said, I’m sure things are going to change very quickly and be quite drastic, so keep checking back to see what’s been going on.

Speak soon,

Sabrina