I took this photo next to a cashpoint in the centre of Oxford a few weeks ago. A few days later I saw another fascist slogan by another cash machine on the outskirts. In the past I might have occasionally seen a fascist slogan scrawled on the door in a public toilet, but never out in the open like this. And one week ago today, in what I imagine will prove to be a historical date, England and Wales (but not Scotland and Northern Ireland) voted to leave the European Union, and since then there have been enough news stories a spike in racially motivated attacks for the Prime Minister to comment on it.
Today, these are the pages that Facebook suggests I might consider joining:
A few of my friends shared this (from 2014) on the eve of the Referendum. It’s looking likely that if the UK leaves the EU, Scotland will leave the UK, so that’s a lot of unions potentially broken. (My personal opinion: both the UK and the EU are in dire need of a structural rethink – but I’d much rather that was done over decades rather than years.)
Whichever way you vote, the old saying stands:
If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.
The second recommendation of this month is also from my week of mixing and mastering in SSR London. This time from my classmate Micaela Hourbeigt: resident of Argentina who had flown in to London to brush up on her studio skills, see some friends, have a holiday, and shake her head in bewilderment as Brexit shit went off the chain all around her.
Together we managed to break teacher Johnny with our never-ending stream of questions (“Yeah, I’m coming to that part…” basically became his catchphrase.) And then we did the traditional swapping of each other’s music. And she hit me with a triple volume concept album, which is fairly hardcore.
Something we’re hoping to try out at Folk Weekend this year is creating more opportunities for local folk artists to get on our radar.
Specifically, we’re hoping to hold an event very soon (and maybe more than one if it’s successful) in which local folk musicians can come and play, and chat with us, and we can generally get to know each other. (more…)
Jonathan Espinosa, pictured in front of his beloved Neve mixing console.
The first of this month’s recommendations: Jonathan Espinosa’s ‘Minology‘ project.
Johnny was the teacher for a week long mixing and mastering course I did last week (which was, as it happens, an awesome birthday present!) And Minology is the name of his first solo album, and also his latest artist name.
We listened to this album a lot, usually broken down into little pieces.
Johnny cut his teeth in House music. And I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for House. (As Carl Cox once said, “Garage is where I put my car – House is where I live.”) But this album takes some of the principles of modern club-based dance music and applies them to acoustic music, particularly Flamenco. I’m not aware of anything quite like it. The closest comparison I can think of is the first Cafe Del Mar album, which I played so much in my twenties that I wore the record grooves away. Or I would have, if I hadn’t listened to it on CD.
So why not give it a listen. And keep an eye out for the new Minology album ‘Inner Sanctum’, out this year.
Oh, and one of Johnny’s top tips:
Avoid using multiband compression when mastering if you can, because the inevitably shallow frequency crossover curves mean that certain frequencies get compressed twice, and that can cause unnecessary phase distortion. Far better to run a compression sidechain high-pass filter so the whole mix isn’t disrupted by those energetic low frequencies.
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