The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

I was totally blown away by this video. I'm not sure what I expected, perhaps a huge floating island of garbage maybe a WALL-E at sea moment. Check out the video below. 

Charles Moore on the Garbage Patch

Charles Moore on Wiki

Garbage Patch on Wiki

Hazy Recollections- 4th April

The second Hazy Recollections will be held in Stereo on the 4th April between 2pm and 6pm. It's the perfect way to spend your chilled out Easter Holiday Sunday.

Bands booked so far are:
Findlay Napier www.findlaynapier.com
The Injuns (acoustic)- www.injuns.co.uk/
Rachel Seranni-www.myspace.com/rachelsermanni
Julia and the Doogans- www.myspace.com/juliaandthedoogans

With more acts to be confirmed.

Hazy Recollections- Sunday Times Article

How many folk does it take to create a sensible name for a musical genre? In the past 10 years, the folk movement has scattered off in numerous directions, filed under sub-genres such as psych-folk, anti-folk, freak-folk, neo-folk and acid folk. In Scotland, folk comes straight up with fiddles. It has a distinctive Celtic sound that conjures up images of pub lock-ins on stormy islands and impossibly long walks up very steep mountains.
Outside Scotland, folk means very different things. In America, it’s Americana; in England, it’s sea shanties and Morris dancing. It’s also used to describe a new generation of young acoustic bands singing thoughtful songs with a whimsical edge. It’s nu-folk.
“There are so many different terms, it can get complicated,” says Findlay Napier, who is launching a nu-folk night to provide a platform for Scotland’s growing list of bands who fall under the umbrella. “But I like nu-folk because it’s finally a term that describes what the Americans and the English have been calling folk music for ages.”
When Napier started his present band, Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers, he struggled to explain to people exactly the kind of music they made.
“In Scotland we have this very lovely thing called folk music, which the rest of the world calls Celtic music,” he says. “Nu-folk is quite handy because it’s a pigeonhole that’s quite easy to put people in. It’s got acoustic guitars, nice singing, decent songs, but it’s not indie, it’s not rock and the issues are perhaps bigger than in the kind of music aimed at teenagers.
“In the States, we were a folk band but over here we kind of fell between the cracks. People would say, ‘what kind of band are you in?’ and we’d say, ‘a folk band’, and they’d expect us to play pipes and fiddles. But that’s not what we do. And we couldn’t really call ourselves Americana because it sounds a bit silly. Scoticana? I think I prefer nu-folk.”
Hazy Recollections, a bi-monthly afternoon nu-folk shindig at Stereo in Glasgow, begins on Saturday. For anyone still unsure of what exactly constitutes nu-folk, a few hours in the company of the six artists performing — including the hotly tipped Glaswegian female minstrel Pearl and the Puppets and the Virginian singer-songwriter AJ Roach — should provide the answers. Findlay Napier and The Bar Room Mountaineers, the Brother Louis Collective, Kitty the Lion, and Captain and the Kings complete the line-up.
“We’d all been talking about starting something like this for ages,” says Napier.
“It’s a way for all the bands to get together. We are all playing in the same town, some of us at the same gigs, and I wanted to replicate the atmosphere that there’s always been in the folk scene and at events like Celtic Connections and introduce it into the nu-folk scene. A camaraderie, instead of every man and woman working for themselves.”
In London, the nu-folk scene is thriving, and Napier is convinced that there is just as much talent in Scotland.
“I’d been reading about Mumford & Sons and the scene down in London, and wanted to try to replicate that,” he says. “It’s great to hear bands like that being played on Radio 1. They call themselves a folk band. So okay, the world has changed again, let’s get in there.”
Napier, 31, studied for a BA in Scottish music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) and played in a traditional folk band called Back of the Moon. Before that, he spent a year working as the folklorist Margaret Bennett’s accompanist. After a trip to America he found a change of direction.
“I had a new perspective on folk music and that’s why I started the Mountaineers,” he says. “It was a real eye-opener. We went to Canada and then America and we realised we were the token ‘Celtic music’ act and the rest of the acts were like Pearl and the Puppets.
“We did one folk festival where the headline acts were Kris Kristofferson and Macy Gray. Celtic Connections, which has a really varied programme of music, is far more representative of what a folk festival abroad is like than what you’d imagine.”

Napier now teaches at RSAMD, often covering classes for Phil Cunningham, the accordionist. He’s still involved in the traditional folk scene and runs the Festival Club at Celtic Connections. He has also been signed to a label run by Ronan Keating’s management team to write songs with the former Boyzone singer’s guitarist, Jimmy Docherty. Meanwhile, his band will release a new single in February and an album later in the year.
“I’m very busy but I like it that way,” he says. “And at least when I tell people what I do, they’ll hopefully understand.”
Hazy Recollections, Stereo, Glasgow, Jan 30;
Raise a Glass by Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers, out next month
Nu-folk heroes
The Scottish scene
Findlay Napier and The Bar Room Mountaineers Findlay and his band are leading the Scottish nu-folk revolution with blackly humorous tales of love, debauchery and sin.
He draws on the darker side of folk and country yet has a sound that remains uniquely Scottish.
Pearl and the Puppets Pearl is 21-year-old Kirkintilloch singer Katie Sutherland. Posting four tracks on MySpace brought her the attention of top management company Twenty First Artists (Elton John, Lily Allen) and a publishing deal. She recently recorded with legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur).
Withered Hand Edinburgh-based Dan Willson is making waves with his mournful take on country music. On stage he plays mandolin, guitar and cello while looking extremely upset, but his lovely songs more than make up for the gloomy demeanour.
The English scene
Mumford & Sons Led by Marcus Mumford on vocals and drums, who is the “father” of Winston Marshall on vocals/banjo, Ben Lovett on vocals/keyboards and Ted Dwane on vocals/bass. Radio 1 darlings for their take on the traditional English folk torch passed on by the likes of Fairport Convention.
Noah and the Whale Quirky London five-piece led by Charlie Fink, who writes contemplative songs about broken relationships. The band occasionally add a punk ethic to their wistful folk sound.

Laura Marling A former member of Noah and the Whale, Marling is the Linda Thompson to Fink’s Richard in nu-folk. They used to date but broke up, and Fink wrote soul-baring songs about their relationship that could be seen as “over-sharing”. Her debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, which Fink produced, was a Mercury Prize nominee.

Hazy Recollections

Beneath Renfrew Lane, ensconsed in the bunker of their very own country house, the first ever Hazy Recollections will take place on the 30th January. An afternoon event aimed to showcase five of Glasgow’s finest Nu Folk acts and very special guest direct from America.

Joining us in the drawing room will be the stars of the Hogmanay Show Pearl and the Puppets, the waywardly brilliant songwriting of Findlay Napier, the heart filled orchestral and beautifully eccentric Brother Louis Collective, the upbeat roar of Kitty the Lion, Captain and the Kings smoky folk pop and our American cousin the legendary songwriter A J Roach.

An Afternoon at Stereo
Saturday 30th January 2010
2:30-6pm


An afternoon with the best acts from the flourishing Glasgow Nu-folk scene.

Join us in our baronial bunker @ Stereo for three hours of music, mischief and country house capers

featuring:

Pearl and the Puppets www.myspace.com/pearlandthepuppets

Findlay Napier & The Bar Room Mountaineers www.myspace.com/findlaynapier
Brother Louis Collective (acoustic) www.myspace.com/brotherlouismusic
Kitty the Lion (Duo) www.myspace.com/kittythelion
Captain and the Kings www.myspace.com/captainandthekings
A.J.Roach www.myspace.com/ajroach

Plus special guests to be confirmed...

Tickets £6

For more details visit

WWW.FindlayNapier.com

Harry Met Charlie

I found this review today

" 8 out of 10: Is it even possible to dislike a band who writes a love song about Charles Darwin and a tortoise (the titular Harry, who actually turned out to be a Harriet and died aged 176 in an Australian zoo)?

No, of course it’s not, especially when that band write a particularly charming style of folk pop. Even the dub remix is really good, as is the alternate version of the main song, even if it does sound a bit like it should be on a bad US sitcom."
Review by Will Slater.
DSD

The First Gig (originally posted on www.gardensessions.co.uk)

Another Beatles anniversary blows by in a flurry of screaming teens and bigger than Jesus bonfires. They, those who say these things, say that no band will ever see the frenzied mass of jailbait combined with the unrelenting media presence that became known as Beatlemania.

Looking back to the sixties it seems like almost every week a now legendary band exploded onto the TV screens blowing the tinny speakers of the only telly on the street. It made me realise that, as a child of the eighties and a teen of the nineties, I don’t really remember any bands that grabbed me like the Beatles had done in their heyday. To make matters worse the only band I do remember getting any real media was the Beatles when their Anthology documentary was released.

I did listen to music. I can remember when Graceland came out and our Ghanaian next-door neighbour taught us to dance African style. A style I promptly forgot and reverted back to my failsafe ‘hide outside the village hall and smoke rollies’ the dance technique favoured by all sweaty palmed wallflowers.

And, during those long dark winter nights, accompanied by my brothers and a ramshackle team of neighbours and visitors kids, arranging frighteningly complicated dance routines to Micheal Jackson’s ‘Bad’. Routines that usually ended in a performance to a bemused group of tipsy parents followed by a fight and Southpark style cries of, “Screw you guys. I’m going home.”

But the band, and I mean the band, that drew me like a spotty moth to a distortion-laden flame was Wolfstone. They truly are the band, like the Beatles for many fifty somethings, are inextricably linked to my teenage years. They are the band that I can preface a story with, “I was there when”.

I think fondly of staring out a maths room window, oblivious to the lesson, with merry sound of tinnitus ringing in my ears. The previous evening had been spent standing next to the speakers of the largest PA ever crammed into Elgin town hall while Wolfstone, turned way past eleven, leapt about the stage.

So, forgive me, here we go. I was there when one November night a little known local folk combo from Inverness were playing in the Stakis Hotel Coylumbridge. This purpose built pleasure dome located at the foot of Cairngorm was home to an ice rink, the Swim Lunch (not the Lunch Swim as that would have been dangerous), the largest crossbow in the world and a sticky floored monument to the boozy weddings that had been before known as Cairngorm Suite.

 

I had never heard of Wolfstone and I must remember to ask my folks why they chose to take me. It was a ‘Birthday Treat’ it may even have been my thirteenth birthday which would make it in mid November 1991.

The band overcame initial problems with the cold vibeless function suite by turning off all the lights. This prompted my now blinded mother to complain loudly to all within earshot, including the band and probably some mountaineers camped out in the Lairig Gru that this was NO GOOD and she couldn’t see. Following my Father’s lead I shrunk beneath table hoping this would deflect the daggers of the seething crowd of around twelve people that were rattling about in the gym hall sized room.

The buzz of amps, a squeal of pipes, a flickering as a dark shape passes in before a Marshall half stack. The ubiquitous bang as an unmuted cable is plugged in and they were off. The disco lights came on and everyone went crazy. I’m pretty sure by the end of the night there were only about fifty people there and all, including my folks, were throwing themselves around the dance floor like bedlamites.

Aside from the volume, the lights and the pure excitement the thing that sticks most in my memory is that after the raffle (!) and before the encore the band asked the audience if they knew any good drummers or bass players. We’d been listening to a drum machine all night and hadn’t noticed, presumably because it was so dark. Imagine being in the cavern club when John, Paul and George were looking for a replacement for Stewart Suttcliffe or Pete Best. I was there. This was a major moment in musical history and I was there. I was there soaked in sweat, knackered and awestruck wishing that I could play drums or bass. I should have just lied and said I could. Surely they would have taken me seriously.

Officially this wasn’t the first concert I’d ever been to. But, if this makes sense, it was my first gig. This concert was different in that: a) I remembered it for longer than a week and b) It was, in the full sense Oxford English dictionary sense of the word, awesome. So awesome in fact that it made me realise that I did not want to join the Merchant Navy or be a vet or a bed tester for Silentnight or any of the other list of so called proper jobs a teenager dreams of. Each year this knowledge was further galvanised by other birthday trips, usually to Eden Court, to see the mighty Wolfstone strut their stuff before an unhinged home crowd. Unfortunately by that time they had a bass player and a drummer and had completely ignored all my letters offering services on bodhran and backing vocals.

I know that late at night many twenty and thirty something fans, their pride washed away by a high tide of nostalgia and alcohol share their teenage Wolfstone stories and listen to Unleashed on repeat. At 5am a neighbour will call the police complaining of thunderous dancing followed by loud singing. Then there is quiet followed by the occasional sniffle as ‘Song For Yesterday’ fades out.

MyFaceSpaceBook 2.0 (originally posted on www.gardensessions.co.uk)

It's 2:30 AM, I have drunk a large amount of overpriced Irish cider and I am on Facebook. Why? It is simple, like most musicians I have become a web 2.0 addict. I see myself in a few years time, beard flowing round my ankles, a blanket wrapped around my skeletal form in an empty flat. Empty but for a winking wireless router and the warming glow of a battered laptop. The production of music will have ceased and all that my creativity generates will be a stream of 150 character outbursts that will largely be ignored by my close friends and fans alike. And the addiction goes deeper. I find myself mid conversation idly checking my Blackberry for a status update or a so-called friend request. Nevertheless it is amazing. I mean, you can actually hear what your friends in North America are having for breakfast today or delight in the unfocused photos from last night's post gig bender.

 My addiction took root in February. Celtic Connections over and faced with an empty diary I decided to make use of my time by exploiting online marketing opportunities or, in the common tongue, pissing about on the internet. I twittered, plurked, meemed, myfaced and spacebooked. I blogged and uploaded, I requested and commented and within one month I had more gossip and insights into lives of others than a hyperactive Stasi agent. 'How exciting', I thought to myself, 'I have all these friends who all love my music (and I, of course, love theirs too). I have a huge mailing list and the ability to communicate my every thought to my thousands of fans. But something feels wrong.'

I felt empty. I'd been living like Jeff Lebowski. No nihilist had urinated on my rug however I'd been pretty much living in my dressing gown and the floaty bits in my coffee indicated the milk was way past it's sell by date. I knew the whereabouts of all my friends, I knew where they'd been on holiday, I'd seen their cousin’s new baby and the pattern on their new wallpaper but I hadn't actually spoken to any of them face to face. All I really knew had appeared exactly 58 minutes ago with a link attached.

I had to go to the pub. I settled on The Ben Nevis. There were real people there, which at first was a bit unnerving. I talked to them. They talked back. I met people I didn't know and talked to them. They also talked back. There was live music, someone sang, too many percussionists joined in and a flautist took the huff. That was Public House 1.0, unchanged for centuries, the original and best. At closing time I jumped in a taxi headed home. Then safely ensconced in the bosom of Napier Towers a glass of single malt quivering in one hand, I posted it all on the bloody internet.

There's just so much out there. I checked on Wikipedia and the amount of social networking sites rises each day. In March there was around 80 today that's up to over 150.  Web 2.0 is taking over. I was once shown a load of post-punk fanzines and was amazed by what they contained. Ridiculous articles, outright slagging matches, love letters, hand drawn pictures of gigs and a real sense of what the fans really wanted. Those homespun pamphlets of the 80s and early 90s have been replaced by the slick interactivity of MySpace and Facebook Fan sites. Slick it may be but every interaction is either restricted or over edited.

The main thing Web 2.0 has lost, and I am oh so guilty of this, is the total lack of criticism. Everyone loves everyone on MySpace. "Your songs are awesome :-)" This from an American Country star who has failed to note that at that point I have not recorded let alone uploaded any songs to the internet.

I dare you. No, I double dare you. To post one balanced critical comment on MySpace and see what happens. There is the chance your account may be deleted or you will be swamped by a never-ending torrent of hate but I suspect that the real outcome is that no one will notice. Either you criticism will never see the light of day, deleted before it even reaches the publishing stage or it will be published instantly and never read.

Back to the addiction and the point of this Blog. If Twiitter were a spliff and Facebook a cocaine habit then blogging must be the intravenous users opiate. The chaps at the Garden Sessions have uncovered my secret and in exchange for my services they are providing me with the hit I need each month. I will rant, list and even perhaps review but don't be shy, I want your criticism so leave a comment- the ruder the better. Apart from anything else you might give me something better to write about.