Some photographed textures of the rusting metal work found around the beautiful West Pier in Brighton, along with soundscape compiled from sounds recorded on Brighton seafront.

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When I was over in New York a couple of months ago I spent a few days in my hotel bed (unsuccessfully) trying to recover from a nasty flu like thing. I had nothing much to do except read, sneeze, cough, listen to the aircon and channel hop. I was captivated by some of the weird Christian religious programmes being shown. I created this piece using some samples from one of these, the premise being that you send the TV station some money and miraculously all your problems are solved….you see it seems that God works like this…..you make some TV Pastor and his crony’s rich and then he’ll/she’ll sort out your problems in return. It’s strange that they never taught me that God was a media savvy, capitalist con artist at Sunday School. Surely, preying on people, in such a way, when they’re so obviously desperate and at such a low point in their lives is quite possibly the cruelest, most cynical thing, one human being can do to another. If I was a Christian I would surely believe that this could only be the work of the devil….scary stuff.

Of course, most of this is just my humble opinion and we all have the right to believe what we want to believe but, I’m convinced that the following are better beneficiaries for your money -

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Emergency Exit by Steven Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Based on a work at listenhear.podbean.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://listenhear.podbean.com/important-copyright-details/.

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The first album I ever bought was Aladdin Sane (the second was a David Essex lp, so I can’t claim that many cool kid points), anyway….on my journey home tonight I revisited this Bowie classic and was once again just blown away by it’s brilliance. What really struck me this time was the fact that I’m now convinced we’ve all forgotten how to mix, we (OK, I, perhaps?) have become just to reliant on automation, non destructive wav editing and the many hundreds of plugins at our disposal.

Its a crash course for the ravers…

Listening to this recording is just mind blowing, remembering how a final mixdown was as much of a performance as anything else anyone did. For me you can just tell that everyone involved, from Bowie to the tape-op, just oozed talent, amazing creativity and the kind of technical skill I just haven’t heard or seen for such a long time. RCA apparently didn’t like the mix of some tracks which leads me to believe I need to dig around further and find out what else was around so I can compare, it may be, nevertheless, simply the case of this album being way ahead of it’s time…something which most A&R and record company employees (from my experience) are particularly bad at spotting and especially later admitting to.

So while I try a discover just when the world forgot how to mix, I suspect sometime in the late 80’s/early90’s, I’m going to once again enjoy Panic in Detroit (listen and remember what it was like performing a final mix down in real time) and I’ll probably lust, just a little, at the stunning snare sound on Cracked Actor.

Talking about cracked actors and forgetting how to mix here’s an out take from my week.

Vindice1 by Steven Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Based on a work at listenhear.podbean.com.

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I should have mentioned that the voice on “Tell Me Tonight” (below) is that of the very talented Clare Cameron.

Tell me Tonight - A collaboration between Steven Brown and Nicola Field/Steam Control. This piece was part of ‘Why Won’t You Tell Me?’ which was recently presented at the X08 Festival at the BFI.

The usual internet compression….

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Some thoughts from my train journey today… Are we losing our individualism in a search for perfection? Computers have, in no small way, contributed to this as, as an example, they offer us all the same fonts and spellchecker facilities. Anyone in the world could write these sentences in Arial 12pt. Apart from my choice of words and the order I decided to place them in, what singles out this piece of writing from anyone else’s, where is my individual stamp? How do you even know that I’ve written this? My handwriting is a left handed dyslexic scrawl, often difficult to read, so Arial 12pt at least gives me some hope of being understood. But it’s exactly this, my scrawl, that separates me and identifies me, along with the crossed out, wrongly spelt words and doodles in the margin. Who is to blame? William Caxton? Henry Mill? Gates and Jobs? How can you be an individual when your writing looks like everyone else’s? Handwritten songs and music from Lennon to Bach sell for thousands of pounds at auctions, but what now? If a lyric or piece of music is written using a word processor where is the interest and soul in that? The mistakes and rewrites are deleted the spelling is usually correct and it’ll be cut, copied and pasted to perfection, the anguish, struggles and mistakes, which any great artist goes through when creating, are lost and with it also, possibly our understanding of the work itself.  

As I’m writing this my (poor) grammar is being highlighted, how dare this software offer an opinion in such a way.  Is your choice of font about as much of a symbol of your individuality as it now gets?

I use computers everyday, I compose and create, I write, I edit my photographs, but how am I really able to keep the processes I go through which, in years to come, will validate the decisions I make/made.  

Have we become just too obsessed with this neatness and common form?  What can we do to maintain any individualism (red underlined check spelling) when creating on our computers?

I think I’m searching for a way to highlight the many imperfections which single me out and make me, me.  

I suppose it’s quite natural for us all to want the finished ‘product’ to be as good as it can be, but I also think we should not shy away from sharing the mistakes which we all make achieving this. This is where I fell asleep, somewhere around Three Bridges…no doubt to be continued…

lr2 by Steven Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Based on a work at listenhear.podbean.com.

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Some out takes, a few FX and tones from a recent design.

OUTAKES by Steven Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Based on a work at listenhear.podbean.com.

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Today is the first anniversary of this audio diary of mine…I can’t believe how many visitors it’s had and how many subscribers it’s got…just a little place on the web to store a few sonic memories of mine and a cupboard for an ongoing project which gestates in my mind daily. Anyway, thank you, I’m glad other people seem to enjoy it. No one is more surprised than me that I’ve managed to keep this up!

It’s frustrating that my recorder isn’t primed and ready when I hear the really interesting sounds…but…one day…

The most popular entry.

And

A bowl of fruit :)  

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‘The Dead Dog’ - one of my collaborations with Poet Nicola Field for Why Won’t You Tell Me? The first of Steam Controls Castwords series. It’s also included as part of the sound design exhibit at the V&A’s Collaborators: UK Design for Performance. Dody Nash commissioned me to create something for her brilliant Listening Shell…also at the V&A you can hear that here…Lost at Sea…

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Interesting

Beautiful colours outside my window this morning.

 So, it’s Halloween and north Manchester has been thrown into darkness, a power cut….or at least I hope (cue: very deep reverberant long laugh) thats what’s happened…(cue: Squeaky floorboard and the sound of a quiet irregular breath behind me)….

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My friend Linda recommended this, do watch…some stuff we all know about but also a few surprises….

So it’s turning cold.

As I waited on the tram station platform this evening I began to ponder the lack of whistling in the world…whatever happened to people walking along the road whistling a favourite tune? I haven’t heard anyone doing this in ages….the world may be a pretty awful place at the moment, but maybe things might feel a little better if….I want to encourage the return of whistling, so if you’re a window cleaner, postman, milkman start whistling again today…I’m going to start practising. Mind you if Roger Whittaker ever reads this, then I hope he’ll ignore this plea….whistling that well is just plain annoying… Right….time for a cup of tea…. 

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Something for the Leigh on Sea dancers…look out Essex!

Bear Baiting and DNA tests…… JK one of the great thinkers of our time….:)

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A little experiment using my mobile phone camera and sounds from this audio diary…… #1

Sorry to the 10 of you who watched and/or downloaded this clip today, I found a number of errors and there was a couple of awkward sound edits…so I’ve rectified these and reloaded the video! Less haste, less haste…….

18.31

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This is something I created for “Reaching for the Heavens” part of the Scenofest opening ceremony.  It was played in the Tower of Babel whilst some wonderful creations were flown and paraded.  

OK, so I wasn’t supposed to do this, someone pulled out at the last minute because of illness and I needed to come up with something very quickly. This was composed entirely in one take (no going back to remix, re-edit or readjust), I simply gathered some sounds from my collection and created textures using Reason. The whole thing was created in half an hour, whilst sat in a noisy production office with my laptop and headphones…I enjoyed the experience on this occasion, but I want to remix and change it but so far I’m resisting this temptation.

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Nothing on the TV…taking a break; hopping and hoping…

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All I’ve yearned for today is a bowl of Ambrosia Rice Pudding….don’t know why…

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