Raul Azevedo Ramos – Page 7 – Ⓡⓐⓤⓛ 'ⓢ Ⓢⓞⓤⓝⓓ Ⓙⓞⓤⓡⓝⓐⓛ

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 3.2: SFX: Hard Effects Editorial

In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:

BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.

In this post, I’m mainly going to expose my ideas on Hard Effects.

HARD EFFECTS

The editing of these was straightforward. There were only a few moments where hard effects were necessary.

Handy Camera Scenes: Regarding these set of two scenes, I have recently watched a sound design case study of Jurassic Park, where Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer, was confronted by scientists about whether the sound of the T-REX was authentic or not. They claimed that the animal didn’t add the ability of roaring, while in the film, for a long time, the sound of the animal was highly connected to what Gary Rydstrom designed. The scientists were demanding Gary to fix it and make it more realistic and scientifically correct. Gary responded: “Well, it’s a movie.”. This example is vital to refer to my process while editing the sound for the handy camera scenes. When editing sound, the editor needs to remember what he is doing: Is he/she/they helping the story? Is he/she/they damaging it? I did exaggerate the notion of space and acoustics to fulfil the story’s desire. I add several effects to intensify the feeling of watching a video poorly recorded. Apart from the usage of RC-20, I added the sound of me handling a microphone with LPF and an effect of the character zooming in. The bulls that he is filming sound too close, and the ambiences sound too present. These are obviously decisions mainly to enhance the story.

In this video, Gary Rydstorm debunks the sounds used to create T-REX‘s voice.

Cow field: The cow field is, for me, a pretty exciting scene. It shows both characters on a wide shot entering the forest from an area full of cows. They are everywhere. As previously discussed, cowbells are a significant detail to that scene. However, the background needs more depth. A lot more cow sounds were added, such as breathing and mouth sounds. I still intend to record a cow walking as I couldn’t find any sound that could do the job. I also added fly sounds.

Forest: If we could separate the film into two worlds, there would be the Outside of the Forest and the Inside of the Forest. They are sonically different, but both help each other to become one. Although, the forest is more hostile and eerie than the outside. There’s barely a sign of life apart from some birds and bugs. What provokes its eerieness is the sound of trees and how the whisper interferes with them. Apart from the creaking, I used the sound of broken sticks to tell the spectator that something was coming. It already has the information that a so-called whisper has been after them for a long time. The first snap comes right before the Title when both characters are already out of the frame, and the camera panned and zoomed on a specific point of the woods. This would be the second interaction and fear-inducing sound. It would appear again in the whisper, followed by numerous other sounds of wood cracking and snapping and later the falling of trees and destruction. Nevertheless, there’s no information on these sound elements in the script, and it was pretty challenging to decode it. The idea behind the inclusion of these sets of sounds among the whisper scenes, came from the 2019 O que arde (Fire Will Come) film directed by the three-time award-winning Galician film director, Oliver Laxe. David Machado was the sound supervisor for this film, and he explains, in an interview with Óscar de Avila for Bobina Sonora, a blog magazine dedicated to Sound for Film in the Spanish Film Scene, the world inside O que Arde, and how eclectic it sounds. The most enigmatic and atemporal scene is the opening one. In the sequence, we see a couple of shots of trees being lightened by some sort of light source as if they were being exhibited. Suddenly, trees start falling, followed by visual and sonic information. Then a slow fade-in in sound introduces machinery as an acousmatic sound. Then, the machine is introduced. And then another one. The soundscape becomes an orchestra of organized sound and ends with the encountering of another tree which seems to be held like a reliquary of that environment transitioning to another world of the storytelling.

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 3.1: SFX: Backgrounds

In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:

BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.

In this post, I’m mainly going to expose my ideas on backgrounds.

BACKGROUNDS

I am pretty happy with the result that I’ve got with ambiences so far. The production sound was good on certain occasions, but overall it sounded bland – no depth nor exciting elements that could enhance the story. For each sequence, there were different solutions. Here’s a list of all the locations relevant for this editorial:

Digital Processed Ambiences: At first, I considered using an actual recording of a handy camera in a forest near London. However, I remember that solving sound editorial issues is not always objective as it might look. For example, my first ever foley session was chaotic because I didn’t have enough knowledge to understand that some sounds aren’t reproduced only by their source. Furthermore, not all handy cameras have that retro feeling that the spectator is expecting. Cinema not always uses truth to be truthful. Cinema is a clever lie developed by professionals. Therefore, for all scenes with the handy camera, I used one of RC-20 presets (Retro Color 20 by XLN Audio) and applied it in the other food groups for those scenes only.

*Editorial Screenshot* showing *RC-20* the plug-in used for the digital processing sound

Mountains: There were only two scenes with this shot. A big mountain can be seen with some low clouds. Some electrical interference damaged the production sound, so I had to recreate the ambience. Nonetheless, I didn’t particularly appreciate how it sounded concerning the film’s leitmotif. This scene is quite essential to establish a modality. I added wind sounds, made it more airtight, and gave it a little time location. Time is an interesting topic to debate about this film. There’s no perception of time throughout the whole short film.

Inside the Forest: Most of the actions where the characters interact are taken place inside the forest among tall pines. Some shots portray a confusing and labyrinthic forest which the production sound couldn’t express. I decided to recall my personal experiences whenever I was in a pine forest. They are quite common in Iberia, but they all differ in terms of the soundscape. One of the most characteristic sounds related to them is the wood creaking by the force of the wind. It reminds us of a woodpecker or something big moving. When we try to locate those sounds, we can’t trace what’s provoking them. Therefore, I decided to add them dispersed throughout all the scenes that became silent. It gave a different perspective towards the story and the action and helped engage the eerieness out of those sequences.

Outside the Forest: These scenes were crucial to separate the two worlds represented in the short film. Inside the forest seems like there’s something very obscure lurking in the shadows. Whereas outside of it, there is an entirely different world, full of rich sound elements that relocate the characters in a wild but yet familiar scenario such as the cow fields. When I showed my editorial to Harry Charlton, a course colleague, he was intrigued by the cowbell sounds that were “everywhere”. I didn’t realise how powerful that sound was in terms of geographical context. I did a little research on cowbells usage, and I came across something like a founding for me – the traditional usage of cowbells are almost exclusive of the Iberian Peninsula. Could it be confusing for other spectators? I think not. I think it’s part of its identity.

Iberian Heritage

Rebecca Lennon: there’s a predominant rhythm in voice.

Rebecca is an artist from London that produces large-scale multichannel audiovisual projects. She has a predominant concept of using rhythm and musicality within video and sound editing to disturb the narrative flow by evoking a psychological and neurodivergent relationship to language, words, loops and noise – meditating on memory and its voices, while spatialising layers of sound, vibrations and visceral texts that fragment and repeat.

MOUTHS: is a project developed for David Dale Gallery (2021). It is a pop song with a lot of emphasis on vocals. In the performance, I used a red cover to defuse my silhouette.

WORDS ARE ANGULAR SHARP (2018): Rebecca started to pay more attention to sound in this project. I began to use sounds that usually edit them out as the central focus of my pieces. I started working with vocal percussion. It was released in Matts Gallery.

EATING THE WALLPAPER COLLAPSES THE SHARP LINES (2019): How voices can be spatialised? It is an eight-speaker polyvocal performance that took place in Kunstraum. Apart from a live vocal performance, some other pre-recorded voices were going around the audience. The performers were wearing black suits, while the audience was lighting different RGB colours throughout the undertaking.

LIQUID I (2020): 6 speakers installation that took place in Nottingham exploring vocal percussion. The breaking point of this piece started with carp fishing in Nottingham. She talked to a fisherman who describes the experience as landscape photography. The fished is captured, held by the capturer, and then shared in a large community of people that appreciate the same practice. Photographs circulate as trophies. In this piece, I was focusing on the carp experience that has been captured. Another motif was the mosquitos recorded in a Medical School. Rebecca collab with Sophie Jung.

THE KNOT COMMONS: Three-channel video performance in Southwark Park Gallery and Matts Gallery (commission) in 2021. Mouths spit water. Mosquito split blood. Everything is interconnected with rhythmic sounds. The three performers were placed in different locations in the installation, and they had other scripts.

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 2: dialogue editing

Even though it wasn’t requested to students to do dialogue editing to their projects, it would be complicated to deny that factor in my project. I recognize the time implications it takes in others to perform a good session of precise noise cleaning and room tone fluidity, however, this project is also a good way to practice and to make mistakes. Another mistake I took was selecting a film of 8 minutes to edit instead of 3-4 minutes. By the time that I’m writing this post, I already edited dialogues, and I’m organizing and spotting my backgrounds and hard effects. Nevertheless, and as I referred previously, learning is a process of irregular successes and failures, and again, today (18/11) I fell into another of my mistakes: I forgot to update my Pro Tools Ultimate subscription and now I have to wait 48 hours for AVID to accept my academic version request. I’ll use this time to write my process in the project so far and explain my intentions.

Last Tuesday I had a tutorial with Tim Harrison. He told him about all my ideas and discussed my projections for the whisper. We discussed the idea of making a non-humanized sound so it maintains its ambiguous and hermetic language. If I use recognisable sounds, the spectator will try to visualise its form and ways of being. The sound must be unrecognisable for us, but not the characters – because they are the only ones who know what to expect. I also told me about other examples of sound design that uses the opposite technique to trick the spectator. One of them was the bear scene on Annihilation by Robert Eggers – the film gives the spectator the information that one of the characters didn’t die through sound, but then it’s struck by the surreal alternative of a bear-like creature adopting the missing character’s voice. It expresses antagonistically the idea that I want to produce: I don’t have a plot twist nor a surprising sound that might trigger the viewer’s imagination. I want total confusion and no sense of understanding. However, the characters perfectly know what to expect. They are the only ones who know how it sounds and how it behaves and even if it has a form. They are the only ones who possess knowledge.

My way of editing dialogues, and other groups in general, starts with the premise “Story Drives Every Decision” and I keep asking myself throughout the editorial whether the decision helps or hurts the story. So, mostly, my decisions consider the plot and concept. After, preparing my session with all the tracks I needed, I started arranging the clips for continuity purposes. This short film doesn’t have many extra possibilities in case it lacks something specific. In this case, the film was recorded with only one boom, and even though it is very well recorded, some things must be overedited in order to reach a decent result, which is the case when some strange production sound steps dialogue. In that situation, my only option is to go through all takes and see which one is “cleaned”, but the problem of having only one boom means that for each take there’s only one recording – actors don’t do the exact same acting 5 times in a row unless they are really professional (the actors used were amateurs and non-actors because that’s the way the director likes to work). When there’s no way of fixing audio, my very very last option is Izotope Rx. This program doesn’t do miracles but one can take advantage in order to have decent results. If RX is not sufficient then there’s nothing else I could do (unless I had time to do ADR and money to pay tickets for the Ecuadorian actors fly all the way to London).

RX saved me from saving the story. The film atmosphere is “almost” dead, so I proceeded to delete all the bird and dog sounds existing in most of the scenes, even though there are cows in one of the shots (the film suffered many alterations due to post-production problems; many scenes were deleted as well as many ideas I had back in March when we were on pre-production). It took me at least 4 hours to arrange everything without accessing the studio at any of those times. I’m also reconsidering mixing the film in 5.1 for the assignment. I don’t see myself having the time to do everything I want for this film. I have to be more conscious of it in the future so I don’t have any surprises. Hopefully, backgrounds and effects will only need one session to edit.

Removing Unwanted Sounds from the one of the scenes with De Rustle, De Click, and Spectral Repair

Andrew Pierre Hart: a conversation with noise

He’s only been into sound and music. He liked circular objects and the motion that the turntables had. He uses the example of the bike to refer to movement and how can it take you to different places.

CIRCLES – CYCLES – BALANCE

“Thinking about space and how can we use them.” Andrew talks about how he had to embrace spaces as places to perform artistically. He showed us a video where he tested the acoustics of his atelier with marbles – Andrew suggests, again, movement as the anchor point to provoke change. I moved the marbles; therefore, it made a rhythmic sound. He proceeded by showing us a video recorded in 2019 in Amsterdam, where he films a still shot of a park road, where multiple bikes cross by, suggesting its constant musical and rhythmical capabilities. This piece can be explored in so many ways. You can see and feel the rhythm with different tonalities.

“I’ll ask everyone to put their hands over your ears and just listen for 30 seconds. What do you guys get?”

“We are speakers and listening devices.”

Sonara and Blacousti – oil on canvas 1m x 1.6m – on a view at mixing it up – painting today” Hayward Gallery 2021. London.

Andrew also has done a lot of research into improvisation and conversation in the improvisatory 1:1 exchange part of the BT_3 Residency program at Beaconsfield Gallery 2021. “I asked Shabaka Hutchings a question, and he would respond in the clarinet”. “I don’t know how to explain, but this was a very healing experience.” https://beaconsfield.ltd.uk/b_t3-andrew-pierre-hart-11-exchange-w-andrew-hart-video-reports/

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 1: background ideas about pre-production, production and post-production: organizing and opening the session

This small excerpt is taken from Post Sound Design: The art and craft of audio post-production for the moving image by John Avarese explain really well the logistic problems that inherently come from different workflows and departments inside the post-production phase on a film. Ideally, sound editors want the AAF to be organized as well as for the sounds they select to edit their films. Many times Directors, Producers and Editors don’t take into consideration the hard work driven by the sound department. Sometimes, even sound recordists ignore the importance of making a clean and efficient session out of their job, hoping that any sort of issues might and will be solved in post-production. In the first lecture with Tim Harrisson, he noted down the importance of the relationship director-sound supervisor, and eventually crew-sound supervisor, quote:” You should start doing your sound libraries before production. By establishing a good relationship with the director, you will be able to participate in the pre-production process, alongside the rest of the crew. Later you will be able to hand in your sound library to the editor so they can start using your sounds instead of something that they find.

In Smells Like Sulfur, I’ve had the privilege to start working with the director, Mario A. Arias, a long time before pre-production in February 2021. He showed me the script; we talked about some ideas; made some decisions about some sound concepts we would like to produce. Because it was a small production, I didn’t have difficulties in talking with my other colleagues from other departments. We all knew each other, which made it easier, and my sound recordist, Sergio Argüeso, was very capable and knew what he was doing. We analyse the script together; I warned him about some very important scenes that he would have to make sure sound was recorded immaculately. The film was recorded in Madrid, and by that time I was in Porto, Portugal, with almost no way to be there for the production process and help Sergio with the recordings. He had to “improvise” and be creative as usual. Listening back to production sound I can proudly say that he managed to get a really good result out of the shooting. Nevertheless, the only problem I can point out occurred in pre-production: we started to do sound design for the feature too early. When the film was shot, and later went to post, the sounds we’ve made didn’t match intentionality or concept. I’ll have to redo the sound design for the whisper and a new approach.

My notebook with the notes from the first session

For this assignment, I was asked to be consistent with my blog posts in order to report my process. It’s ironic because I’ve never documented my process before when it comes to sound post-production for film. I did take notes when I was in Film School, paying attention to my tutor’s sessions, shortcuts, ideas, workflow, learning as much as I could to be good at it. Now, I’m taking notes on my own process and reading them back looks like I’m writing down a tutorial. In a academic context, studying film can be overwhelming, and sometimes he can erase your passion for it – which was what happened to me. However, now that I’ve put myself again on the processes I was used to, I’ve got my passion for sound for film again, and consequently, cinema. I retrieved my need to express myself through sound and image.

Luckily, the AAF handed by the editor, Angela Delgado, was perfect, very well organized, and the sounds she used weren’t awful. I also opted to redo my Pro Tools templates for either 5.1 and Stereo. I pretended I was ignorant to the eyes of sound editing as a way to refine my ways in the process – I’m available again to learn more about sound for film and its language. I’m trying a new way of dialogue editing organization: separate the tracks for A and B so I can divide sequences and lately have a more organized session when I start mixing.

In the image, we can see sound groups organized in folders, which are sent to a group of 5.1 STEMS and lately compressed with a Down Mix plug-in for Stereo editing.

Here are the Dialogue Tracks divided by A and B

The idea of looping as an experience: Lucia H. Chung

Lucia explains through a reel her first experience in the UK, Winchester. She didn’t speak English, and as she mentions, she had a culture shock. I was not particularly eager to go to the pub after uni, and I couldn’t communicate very well, so I would sit in a corner. People started saying that I had different personalities depending on the language I was speaking. She became interested in the gap between communication (languages) and how people get caught in that situation. She started with video art. With video, Lucia could see her behavioural response depending on the language she was speaking. In one of her video art pieces, she noticed that the sound would change a lot by speeding up and down the velocity of the image.

Lucia started researching sound arts and came across Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms piece (Touch Records 2006). In this work, the artist goes to Chernobyl and records the room tones who four different interior spaces. She was fascinated by how it was possible to do recordings that way, which recalls Alvin Lucier’s I’m sitting in a Room (1969). Her first sound art piece came in 2009: Spring Piece, Listening by placing your ear on the window. It’s also about her experience in the UK back when she lived in Kings Cross. By that time, she lived in a place that she describes as being awful and decadent. Her window wasn’t double glazed and made a lot of noise whenever a bus passed by. She decided to use the same techniques that Jacob used in his piece. I was trying to work out how to record sound. I’m not musically trained, and I’ve zero knowledge of recording techniques. She kept interested in looping things as a visual and sonic experience. With “2 pm”, I wanted to enhance this idea. ‘Folding’ (2009) is another piece where she experiments with the phenomena, and by “folding”, she meant folding time. Hear One Near and Think of the Other was her last piece before she ended her PhD. It’s a 2-channel durational live performance that took place in 2011. Lucia wanted to invite the listener to walk through different areas. Two performers set it, and they would be playing samples live. In 2011 she played live signal feedback on a piece called Parallel Correlation.

She commented on her experience playing live digitally and in person. She reflects how signal feedback changes when it’s mixed remotely and through speakers into a designed space. Toshimaru Nakamura and Sachiko M. are two artists that reflect on the same topics in a video called No-input: “it’s like a sculpture.”. In 2016 she attempted for the first time No-input feedback in a piece called Inner Geography. I normally use broken mixers because they sound better and have more interesting sounds. Currently, Lucia keeps doing live performances with no inputs. In 2020, she performed Courier Despatch 3 00. In the same here, she performed with Steph Horak and Iris Garrels in an improv session called TRIO (SOLO: DUO: TRIO). I met them the same day we performed at CAFE OTO.

Post Production: part 1

Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio by Mike Senior (book to read).

Comping and Arranging:

Whatever style of music you’re working in, if any of your most important parts are recordings of live performers, you should consider recording several takes and then comping together the best bits. Lead vocals in particular are routinely comped from many different takes in a commercial context. How you go about recording and compiling the takes can have an enormous impact on the quality of the outcome, so don’t be afraid to adapt your techniques to suit the particular part and performer you’re working with.
Reducing clutter (f things lying about in an untidy state) in an arrangement not only makes it easier to mix, but also helps the product appear more varied to the listener. One general-purpose approach is to think in terms of restricting yourself to a maximum of three main points of interest at any one time and then to weed out as many parts as you can that don’t make up this main trio. but do bear in mind that the relative appeal of individual instruments can vary from moment to moment, so the identity of three primary parts may change frequently. Also, try to alter the arrangement to give each new musical section its own sound – this will better maintain the listener’s interest and support the buildup of the product as a whole.
Boring arrangements usually suffer from too much repetition, so consider adding some kind of fill if any part plays the same thing more than three times in a row. If you can aim a fill in one part to grab attention from a less interesting moment in another part, then that’s a bonus. If you’re working in chart oriented styles, then try to provide some new musical or arrangement diversion every few seconds to keep the listener’s attention. Treating the bass line as the second melody is surprisingly effective in improving musical momentum.
If your song ends with a double chorus, but the second of the choruses seem like it’s treading water, experiment with your mute buttons to see whether a drop chorus might bail you out.

Building a Raw Balance

Compressing for a Reason

From a mix perspective, the primary purpose of compression is to achieve a stable balance. If a track balances fine without compression, then don’t feel you have to compress it at all. When compressing you need to ask yourself two questions: Is the compression helping the balance?; and do i like the subjective sound of the processing?

– Beyond Compression

– This doesn’t apply to everything. Its music-based, but it teaches stuff about workflow in post-production.

Making Music – 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers by Dennis De Santis

It’s a great book for electronic music producers in terms of the thinking processes and ways to approach the Ableton as an instrument. It is split into 3 different sections: Problems of Beginning, Progressing and Finishing.

Milo showed the class is a work in progress. It’s a piece accompanied with AI imagery, that reminds me of an SMPTE colour bar. The sound is compelled with a wavy drone with different tempo ratios. The piece reacts to the sounds played, making it feel alive and ongoing. He used playform.io (https://www.playform.io/) – a browser application that creates Art with an AI at a cost of 15 dollars. Milo’s Instagram @sasinswn.aka – he made awareness to understand our current possibilities as artists in terms of showcasing our work and talked about Instagram art pieces.

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: introducing picked film: first ideas : logistics: & more

It’s a film directed by a friend of mine who asked me to be in charge of the sound post-production. The film is called Huele a Azufre (Smells like Sulfur), a post-apocalyptical scenario where there is no information about what happened and what is happening on the planet. The film also questions itself about the state of things by presenting an ambiguous and hopeless perspective over the two main characters: two young men (Emilio and José) that don’t seem to be lost. Still, at the same time, they resemble Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. There is also a huge reference to Pude ver un Puma (Could see a Puma) by the Argentinian Eduardo Williams (https://vimeo.com/404428912).

Visual References, Motifs and Inspiration

*Pude Ver un Puma* (Could see a Puma) by Eduardo Williams – 2011. Visual Reference and identical leitmotif.

*Waiting for Godot* by Samuel Becket. The dialogues in the film are inspired by the piece

Eventually, Emilio and José run away as soon as they hear an eerie sound coming from the woods that seems to haunt them everywhere they go. However, the film doesn’t give the spectator the answers for what could be that noise. While at talks in pre-production with the director and writer, Mario Alejandro Arias, he described the sound as a susurro (a whisper) similar to the biblical one: 1 Kings 19:12 – After the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, there was a voice, a soft whisper.

I don’t have any complicated deadlines for this film, which is perfect for this assessment because I’ll be able to experiment and be creative. Nevertheless, the film is 8 minutes long, with a part in it that has great interest for this unit – a long wide shot of the woods with a bull approaching the camera very subtly and slowly at the same time we hear the sound of the susurro coming closer towards the camera (duration: 2 minutes). Apart from general sound editing, there’s a potentially interesting spatialization, sound design, and foley. In terms of format, I was requested to edit in 5.1, but I assume there will be no problems with downmixing it to stereo. In terms of available resources, I will be working with the material given by the sound recordist and the script for the intentionality guidance.

There is space for everyone in the music scene and Richard Phoenix makes sure that happens

Richard Phoenix is an artist who paints, writes and makes music, helps make people be together and has been working with disabled people for more than 15 years.

Richard started working by playing in bands (Punk: Rock.) in 1997. Punk: Rock. He mainly played the drums. Most of them have been bands or projects embracing DIY ethics and involved with DIY scenes.

DIY: do it yourself. In music, it promotes the idea that anyone can become a musician and share their music. It empowers individuals and communities.

In 2006 he went to a band called Beat Express to play in Brighton, which most of the members had disabilities. It was his first time, and he mentions it as one of the most beautiful gigs he ever went to. Richard supported these musicians with his knowledge of DIY and began discovering more bands like this one. PKN, a Finnish punk band he fell in love with, was brought to the UK because “I wanted them to be inserted in a place where others could love their music”. Constant Flux was founded so he could find finance to bring this band to tour in the UK.

In 2018, he designed a manifesto for the DIY community to follow along. Anti-racist, anti-homophobic. DIY as Privilege – 13 point Manifesto for musicians.

Disability – I use the social model of disability. The idea is that the environment, society, and culture surrounds someone that create barriers and obstacles that disable and exclude them.

This term turned into a full pamphlet going into more depth about the people and ideas that underpin the manifesto. Published by Rought Trace Books and called DIY as a privilege: A manifesto.

There is an audience for everything, and ideas of what is good music will always be political.

“Every art form is intimately related to a type of life experience. The difference between chamber music and jazz is not one of quality, finesse, or virtuosity but of two ways of life, which the people involved did not choose but were born into”

__John Berger

Also, in 2018, I had surgery on one of my ears, marking a step away from bands and music. I had to cancel everything I had planned for six months in terms of tours and gigs. I refocused on painting again and started to rebuild my social life.