Giant Bears: Finding our Way Home

A Giant Bears video made from the footage I shot during the West Highland Way trip:

New Giant Bears Release, Pictures

I just released a new CD-R on Giant Bear Tracks: Whisper in the Hollows. It’s a short fragmented ghost story, heavily inspired by Alan Garner and my own experiences in the Pentland hills and the west coast. Though the music is specific to the physical object, there’s a digital companion piece called Lights on the Ridge you can listen to here:

In other news, I managed to fall on my camera and break it, so I’ve got a new one. It’s got a slightly higher resolution sensor, but the big additions are the incredible 12x zoom (compared to my previous 4x) and the ability to shoot HD video. I’ll try and post some video soon, but until then here’s some pictures I’ve taken with it:

(taken from all the way over here)

I wish I still had that photo

These posts are getting later and later. I’m sorry… I’ll try and do better.

The record label is now up and running, and you can buy my album from the website, though I’ve yet to do any marketing, so no-one’s bought it yet. As well as the album there’s also a wiki, which is the thing I’m most proud of – I plan on making it a huge sprawling mess of a thing, providing a kind of context and mythology for all the label’s music. There’s also some mp3s in there if you’re willing to look around.

The link’s http://www.giantbeartracks.com

I’m going to finish with this video, via RPS. Shades of the Langley Schools Music Project here – it’s the way the kids clearly feel it, without our seemingly all-pervasive irony or detachment:

Something about the sight/sound of a massed choir too*. You can see why christianity makes such use of hymns and singing. There’s something very powerful about a group of people singing together. And rare too, as capitalism alienates us ever more, only ever praising the individual.

* – Especially one not wearing matching uniforms – I think that kind of uniformity works against the choir. The point is that the singers are not homogeneous, replaceable – they’re singing the same thing, but with identical voices the effect would be vastly reduced. Each one is vital to the end result, they’re not simple cogs in a machine. I can’t help seeing it as kind of utopian; a collective of individuals.