Rezillos at the ABC

Last Thursday the Threads folk were at the ABC filming and photographing The Rezillos playing in front of a huge LED video wall (everyone was worried this would create difficulties, but both Paul and Michael (our film guys) and I loved it - usually we're vying for every available photon).  I wasn't particularly familiar with the band before the gig but, as usual with Threads bands, really enjoyed the show.

Faye Fife and Jim Brady

Chris Agnew and Eugene Reynolds

And the giant mirrorball photographed from the upstairs bar:

Athena

Morag's underwater explorations continue...

A very Potato Christmas 2011

This year's traditional Potatoes of Night Christmas photo was made slightly more difficult by pikipimp.com being down, but we managed nevertheless - particularly as Julie had foreseen this difficulty and provided me with some antlers/antennae in-camera...

Bank of England

I'm forever blowing bubbles

My usual lunch date at Di Maggio's was combined with an emergency photo-shot for the December picture in their Christmas calendar.  As luck would have it I'd just given Morag a loan of my flash-gun, so we had to rely on on-camera flash with a hanky over it (to lessen glare a bit).  However, I managed to get some shots (thanks largely to Alison and some cunningly deployed  bubble mixture).

Matthew and the bubbles

Andrew does something complicated with straws while Matthew receives messages from the Heavens (or possibly spots some more bubbles just out of shot).

I dreamed your dress was made of mirrors

Morag in my sparkly dress for the "underwater" part of Saturday's shoot at Dreghorn Studios.  The real submerged photos will hopefully appear soon, but we both quite liked the way it reflected the light onto the walls like a mirrorball.  It also sounds like rain falling on a roof when you pick it up.  (Title borrowed from Zoey Van Goey).

Adam Stafford

Video of one of Adam Stafford's cunningly bizarre loop pedal songs as previously mentioned - think KT Tunstall, but more exotic...

The Windmills of Your Mind

The more you look at photos of wind farms the more strange they seem

  

looking like giant, tethered seagulls 

or angular stick-creatures

standing around in a kind of Dali-esque fashion

on the edge of a illusory body of water.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Taken at Whitelee Wind Farm - officially The Coldest Place on Earth...

Professors' Squirrel

Under Sea, Over Stone

(Title garbled from Susan Cooper).

Pumajaw

The final Threads of Sound of this month featured Organs of Love, Louise McVey and the Cracks in the Concrete, and Pumajaw.

More pics over here.  The videos of several of the recent bands are now up here, including this one of the excellent Pony Boy, shot by Paul Fegan, so you can see what you've been missing if you've not been Threading...

Minx

Cloudburn

The Obsidian Isle

I was at Street Level on Saturday to hear a talk by Gayle Chong-Kwan about her new exhibition "The Obsidian Isle", a collection of photographs of vanished places.   Apparently they're medium format photos (taken on a film-stock that has now been discontinued) of scenes built up from models and old photographs of the places.   They're extremely creepy and lovely - more information on the process of creating them, and a gallery of the photos can be seen here.

Lightbulb Moments

This field of lightbulbs had sprung up outside the library earlier this week - unfortunately they weren't lit when I was going past, and they'd vanished by the next day (it seemed to have something to do with a JP Morgan recruitment drive).

Martin John Henry, 17th c. and Adam Stafford

Back at Stereo this weekend for the latest gig in a Threads-packed month. First on was Adam Stafford, who had one of those cunning looping devices - in the manner of KT Tunstall - but produced much less standard sounding music with it. Many of the pieces had complex layers of vocal harmony, not often involving words, but with an amazing range - right up to unearthly shrieks and siren noises in a couple. Each "layer" had an associated range of dance-moves or gestures (not in a really choreographed way, just that it seemed to go with the sounds) so it was like watching a man in the grip of an incredibly well-organised musical multiple-personality disorder. It's hard to describe - so you should definitely go and see him if you get the chance.

Next were The Seventeenth Century, featuring fiddle and cornet in among the usual guitars and drums, with an unusual and excellent kind of folk-rock thing going on.

And finally Martin John Henry - who was launching his new album.  As usual, more photos over on the Threads Flickr.

Live Re-mix

The Threads folk were back at Stereo last weekend recording/photographing/filming a gig featuring Kid Canaveral then Zoey Van Goey doing a live remix of their songs with GNGR.  

Kid Canaveral were on first (with the stage looking much flasher than usual thanks to artwork by  Katy Wilson)

There were also fairylights strung from the roof  in the style of the Old Fruitmarket.

Next up were Zoey Van Goey, who started off playing some songs in their usual style, only to be joined half way through

 by GNGR who did some live remixing while they played/sang.  I wasn't sure if I was going to like this much, as I'm not usually very into electronic stuff, but it was really good.  I particularly liked  the new version of the "imaginary 8-track" section in "Sackville Sun", which even featured some carefully choreographed "dancing" from the band :-)

More photos over on the Threads Of Sound flickr page.

Carried Away By

Here's my shot from yesterday's levitation workshop in Edinburgh with Miss Aniela (also the model in this photo) which was excellent.  I think my Photoshopping and levitation skills still need some work, but I certainly learnt numerous incantations and got lots of new ideas ;-)

Watermark

I wasn't really happy with the previous version of this picture (which probably makes more sense in conjunction with its accompanying poem, hopefully coming sometime soon to a pamphlet near you...) Anyway, the librarian really needed longer hair so that it could hang in "rats' tails" on her neck, so I hired my model friend Heather (who is actually a librarian in reality) who, as you can see did a great job at looking worriedly waterlogged in her spellbound library (played here by the Level 9 Annexe at the Uni Library).

Govanhill Baths

I met up with Morag and Colin at the Govanhill Baths on Saturday for Doors Open Day. We'd kind of assumed they'd just let you in to wander around taking photos and things, but you actually had to join a guided tour which made life a bit harder (though presumably lessened the chance of people falling into empty swimming pools and breaking their legs).

It was interesting nonetheless though, with lots of wildlife creeping through doors...

And around changing rooms.

The Escher-esque sides of the main pool.  We did ask if they might arrange to let photographers in to wander around a bit more freely (like they occasionally do at  the empty Lansdowne Church on Great Western Road) and they seemed to think that might well be a possibility.  So there may be more photos (from less peculiar angles) at a later date...