Early Bird tickets for WOMAD Charlton Park 2009
There are a limited number of these discounted tickets available, so if the myriad pleasures of a weekend at WOMAD Charlton Park next July figure in your plans, don't miss out on these discounted tickets.
The offer ends December 16th 2008 or before, depending on ticket stocks.
Peter's October update
Peter talks about his performance at the Peace One Day event in London, receiving the Quadriga award "United We Care" in Germany, the soundtrack award for Walle, our Dub Colossus competition at realworldremixed.com and current work on both technology and music projects.
Hector Zazou 1948-2008
It is with great sadness that we have learned of the death of Hector Zazou. The innovative French composer and producer was a regular visitor to Real World Studios and delighted us all with his unique charm. His international reputation came from his diverse musical projects - from rock to classical, avant garde experimental electronica to pure vocal and world music. He worked in collaboration with artists as diverse as Bjork, Jon Hassell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Peter Gabriel, Jane Siberry and LIsa Germano.
Real World Records worked closely with Hector when he produced the exquisite album 'Coming Home' for Tibetan artists Yungchen Lhamo. He then took a voyage of discovery to Tashkent, Uzbekistan to meet Sevara Nazarkhan and produce her ground-breaking debut album 'Yol Bolsin'. His bold and beautiful use of strings, traditional instruments alongside electronica gave both albums their futuristic and yet timeless quality.
One of Hector's most recent projects, a CD/DVD titled Quadri [+] Chromies, result of a two years collaboration with French digital painter Bernard Caillaud which was released in 2006 was designed and authored by the team at Real World's Multimedia Department.
Peter Gabriel pays tribute to Hector in September's Moon Club: " He had a particular, unique personality - very drole, very witty. His musical persona was very emotional but restrained. You could feel the passion but it was kept at an observer's distance. We will all miss him greatly."
Full Moon Club Video
A late night here at Real World putting together Peter Gabriel's Full Moon Club video update - I don't think we've missed more than one or two moons in over five years, but somehow it's always later at night than intended before it's uploaded. At some point we'll get the archive back up and running, it's one of those areas of content that has not recovered from our servers 'disappearance' back in May.
This months clip did give an excuse to get away from the screen for a moment and out into one of the very few rainless days we have had recently in order to grab some photographs around the site. There's more air to come as the trusty Sony EX1 camera is currently outside running an interval record of this evenings rather fine example of a full moon which should come in handy next month.
Digital downloads go live with Big Blue Ball
We've just turned on our new digital download facility on the womadshop.com site. We are still in a pseudo 'soft launch' phase, only one product available so far as we want to deal with any teething problems and get some customer feedback before opening out the service.
The Big Blue Ball record has had such a long gestation, dating back to the famed 'Recording Weeks' here at Real World in the early 90's, that we though we would make it's delivery to the customer as fast as possible. Big Blue Ball is now available as a 320Kbs MP3 or in Apple Lossless format (CD quality, but roughly half the file size). Both options are DRM free and available for a very reasonable £4.99. Purchasers of the CD or vinyl versions also get the benefit of the download system as we now throw in the MP3 version of the album so that you get instant gratification whilst waiting for the joy of a package in the post.
If you do try it out, we'd love to know how it works for you.
If you're busy
Don't update to iTunes 8 and look at the 'even more mesmerizing' new visualizer.
The visualizer seems to be the work of Robert Hodgin, whose work using Processing at Flight 404 is another way to lose some time
dConstruct
Back at The Mill after a thought provoking end to last week at the dConstruct conference, looking at 'Designing The Social Web' at Brighton's Dome theatre. Some good coffee was imbibed and some fresh ideas kicked around, but we also came back slightly deconstructed, a man down, as it was Stefan Goodchild's last day with us before entering the world of 'agile' development in Bristol - in the parlance of the Geek, he's becoming a pig.
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed but you'd only be involved."
We wish him well, not least because we are sure the coffee is better here, and when a man has been indoctrinated to the point of Twittering about his extraction, you know it's not a small matter.
A browse of the speakers from dConstruct and the links to their talks and projects comes highly recommended.
Real World Multimedia - new/old site unveiled.
We've finally got around to making the realworldmultimedia.com site live, it's new to the web, but has actually been sitting around on a back burner here for many months (in fact I think we did the sketches two years ago) I guess it's been pretty busy here, so our own site never found it's way to the front of the queue. The long gestation certainly does not mean it's a highly polished thing, but it is a starting point.
Developing a new retail system at womadshop.com, a ticketing system for the WOMAD festival, moving all our sites to a standards, LAMP based framework (away from the Lasso backwater in which we had found ourselves becalmed). the sudden need to rebuild everything at speed when our servers were stolen from our previous ISP's data centre and generating a great deal of content - photographic, video and audio for the Real World group somehow prevented us making this live. Now that it is up, if you are the kind of person who can see exactly what's wrong with it, you may be just the person we are looking for.
Dub Colossus in a Town Called Addis
This month's release over at The B&W Music Club is from Dub Colossus in A Town Called Addis. We've been working on these projects with Bowers & Wilkins, so you will see our current photo selection is from the recording session here at Real World a couple of months ago. You can also check out the interview we filmed with the group, and hopefully you will be inspired to head over to the B&W Music Club and download the music (4 tracks are free as lossless downloads)
Dub Colossus - Bowers & Wilkins 'Zeppelin'
Remix Sima Edy by Dub Colossus and you could win one of two Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin iPod Speaker systems.
Dub Colossus in A Town Called Addis is An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary Ethiopian artists and Dubulah, bringing hidden gems from Addis Ababa back to England. Dub meets dreamy blues, hypnotic grooves, jazz piano and driving funk brass. Flavours of traditional Azmari singing, 70s reggae and Ethio-pop infuse one of the most alluring and soulful genres of African music.
The album recorded in Addis Ababa and Real World Studios will be available next month exclusively as a lossless download from the Bowers & Wilkins Music Club
