At long last I’m excited to say that I can start sharing Belizean Heat, the follow up to Sonidos de Cuba! I’m really pleased with how this album turned out. It’s quite eclectic, stylistically spanning from ambient and downtempo to progressive house and synthwave, but manages to be cohesive as a whole. It features a wide array of acoustic and electronic instruments, including trumpet, trombone, melodica, xaphoon, shakers, hand percussion, electric guitar and bass, Sonic Forest, Arturia MicroBrute, Elektron Octatrack Analog Four and RYTM, MFB Kraftzwerg, Dave Smith Poly Evolver, Novation Nova, and modular synthesizer. Continue reading “Warming the Winter With Belizean Heat”
Tag: travel
Belizean Heat
In February, my wife and I visited Belize for 10 days . We managed to see a fair bit of the diverse and beautiful country with a few days in Caye Caulker, some time in the jungle, a night in Hopkins, a stay on a mangrove island, and a stop in Placencia before heading home. It’s a fairly small country, but it has a wealth of wildlife with a number of ecological reserves on land and sea. Naturally I brought my H4N portable recorder and Rode NTG3 shotgun microphone, but this time I brought along a JRF Hydrophone and a pair of Roland CS10EM binaural earbuds. Continue reading “Belizean Heat”
Sonidos de Cuba has a new look!
Check out the cover art for my album! It was recently finished by the beautiful and talented Tania Clarke of Side B Design Studio (side-b.ca) who also happens to be my wife. She took some gorgeous photos during our trip to Cuba. If you’d like to have a look please visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidebdesign
In other news, my show at Sequential Circus 11 on August 18th was a lot of fun! I was pretty nervous leading up to (and during) my set. I’ve never sweat so much while playing and my slick lips had a hard time hitting my higher range. I was feeling pretty sloppy with my trumpet playing, and not feeling too good about my performance until after I finished. I received a good round of applause and was given a lot of congratulations on my set so I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought! The rest of the evening was fantastic.
Phonotactic had a great journey of a set using Ableton and a Kaosspad. He went from mellow funky dubby music to thumping floor fillers. Then Tarekith took the stage with his Elektron duo (Octatrack and Machinedrum). His set was smooth, cool, and full of slick production. Next, Dark Arps emerged with gut throbbing basslines and tech funk delights. My friend dubbed him the Techno-borg as he was wearing a Sci-Fi suit that glowed and flashed to the music. It was hot enough there in shorts and a T-shirt so I imagine he was baking in his Borg suit. Muxx followed him with a high energy techno set that reminded me of fun times in early raves. His “One night in East Van” had the whole crowd chanting along with him. Lastly Vincent Parker switched things up with psychedelic synth washed dubby beats. Good times indeed!
The Sequential Circus crew should be posting the sets on their website soon if you’d like to hear them for yourself. I’ll post a link once they emerge. Meanwhile, I’m working on sound design for one of the rooms at this year’s Dunbar Haunted House. It’s turning into a fun creative project making the atmosphere for a Daycare of Doom. I’ve even done some voice-acting. Just one song left to complete for Sonidos de Cuba. This one’s called Ascensor (for now) and features a recording of the elevator in our apartment in Vedado. It would only go up to the 7th floor, but our Casa Particulaire was on the 9th so we’d have to hoof the last two floors. Working elevators are something I never realized I took for granted in Canada until then. Once that one is finished I’ll spend some time mastering the album and then I’ll be able to finally unleash it on the world!
SUBLIME SOUND 