Interview Go!

Minnie Gunn and the Gentlelady Thief

(You might recognise the seeds of this thing here…)

We’ve been having a lot of fun working on it, I hope you have as much fun reading it.

In other news, I have a whole bunch of Workshops in the pipeline, focused in North Yorkshire. Watch this space for more details.

Have a good one, shiny happy people!

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

So, here we go. 2008 in not-especially-ordered list form.

THE NOT SO AWESOME (To get it out of the way)
-Almost getting killed by a falling sheet of metal.
-Having a bit of weird time at my graduation that made it less than happy.
-Spending the entire year firmly and frighteningly in my overdraft.
-Having months and months of being almost unemployable.
-Not being able to spend as much time as I’d like with my family.
-Not taking very well to office dronery.
-In the latter half of the year, not doing anywhere near as much art/writing/bloggery as I’d like.
-The economy eating itself.
-Not dealing with any of this particularly well.

THE CONSIDERABLY MORE AWESOME.
-NOT getting killed by a falling sheet of metal.
-Graduating with a Masters Degree.
-Finally making it to Celtic Connections and having a great time.
-Having a couple of the most taxing but most productive couple of months ever. Involving rewriting, re-penciling, inking and colouring 50 pages of full-colour artwork under deadline insanity and actually getting it done.
-Finishing my new book, and it being published.
-Getting my first part time job before the owner had even finished reading my CV. Learning lots about coffee doing it.
-Spending half a year living with my good friend Mike, and then moving into a new place in an area I really love.
-Parents really helping me out to keep me in Manchester, a city I find myself loving more the longer I live there.
-Spending more time with some genuinely awesome, inspirational and fantastic people. Meeting new awesome, inspirational and fantastic people.
-Seeing some of the above do some genuinely fantastic things. I’m so proud of you guys.
-Running my first workshop, at musicport festival. Getting another for Scarborough Literature Festival next year.
-Getting a little bit of work with Nicalis, the guys doing the Cave Story Wii port. Seeing my work up on IGN, and possibly in Play Magazine, linked to one of my favourite games.
-Started to give myself a little more attention in how I look, and work at making myself look and feel better.
-Parents offering to help me print an issue of something when I get it done. My xmas/birthday present being a big help to that as well (a3 scanner printer).
-Having some really good job interviews, where the feedback has been really positive and it’s only been lack of experience letting me down. One of those interviews also giving me the gift of seeing the very centre of Manchester from like 40+ floors up. It was stunning.
-Finally managing to get another job, even if it’s not the best, and starting to work on fixing my overdraft. And not having student loans or credit cards, so when I’m back to zero, I’ll REALLY be back to zero.
-Via the above, answering some of the questions I’d put to myself about my future and where I should (or shouldn’t) be, and even though those answers were not entirely happy ones, gaining a great deal of conviction on what I need to be doing to make things right.

So, what about 2009?

Well, I don’t know. I’m not going to make promises about posting more or anything (though I am going to try), but what I will say is I’ve very much decided that 2009 is the year of ‘KT gets it together’. Exactly what form that takes, I don’t know yet. But I’m working on it. It’s been a really rough year emotionally, and there’s a lot of things beyond my control that are going to make things tough next year… But I’m going to grab thing one and make it work anyway. Despite the BBC’s insistence that 2009 is already broken, screw them, I wasn’t the one that broke it. This year has taken a lot of my naivety about how the real world works, but it’s also strengthened a lot of of what I feel about how it should be, and what I need to be doing in it.

If I have one resolution I should be making, it is to stop flailing and worrying and just get on with things. (I know the people who know me may respond with ‘well, DUH’ about that, but I stick my tongue out at you.) There has been a lot of success in this year for me, more than I realized until I started writing this post, but some of the less successful times really hit hard and have left me feeling a lot more powerless and useless than I actually am. But it’s time to leave that behind and start working on the things I actually DO have control over. That is so much more easily said than done, but I I don’t intend to let that stop me trying.

So yes. 2008 has been an odd one. Highs and lows all over the place. But I’m going to make 2009 better.

Have a good one, people. I’ll see you in the new year.

And with that in mind, the more I think about it, the more insane it is that I never went to Musicport before.

If you don’t know the festival, it’s a weekend long celebration of world and trad music that used to take place in Whitby but this year took over Bridlington Spa. The atmosphere was great, really friendly and up for anything, and some of the music was top notch. Artists from all over the world, with music ranging from straight up traditional, through jazz and dance of all kinds from tribal to tango to techno. I paid my way by running a small workshop on the basics of manga drawing, which was a lot of fun and I’d love to do again some time. (Perhaps with more than an hour to do it in next time, although some of us relocated to the bar afterwards for more doodling.) I had been a little concerned it was a little unusual to run at a music festival, but there was a decent turnout and it was great to see people of all ages having a crack at drawing. I helped out with the artists’ green room as well, and then spent the rest of the time hanging backstage or being out there enjoying the music.

Suffice to say, I’m more than geared up to go again. In the mean time, I’ll leave you with some of the photographs I took while I was there.

So, if you’re going to be around, I’d love to see you there. It’s my first time doing anything like this, so it should be interesting all round. I’ll be joined by my lovely aunt Jo Freya, and the rest of the weekend for me is going to be taken up with some well needed chilling and lots and lots of awesome trad and world music.

Come check it out!

Okay, so it occurred to me that for a blog called ‘Tea and White Noise’ there’s a concerning lack of actual TEA going on here. I’m drinking plenty of it but I have not been sharing it with you.

Well, I guess I ought to do something about that.

Starting with… uh, well if you’re going to be a purist about these things, actually not really tea, it’s an ‘infusion’. But shhhh.

This one comes in bags rather than loose leaf, and is a limited edition in their ‘fruit bliss’ range. I am already hoping it’s not too limited because I can see myself drinking a lot of this when I don’t want to fill myself with caffeine, and don’t feel like knocking up a whole pot of loose leaf goodness.

I’ll admit I was already biased with this because I love cherry teas and I also love cinnamon teas. I wasn’t convinced the two should together though, and it was actually my house-mate that picked it up for me when we were stocking back up on another twinings tea. I’m glad he did though, because this stuff is great. The main thing for me on this one is the scent. This stuff smells amazing as it brews, a really strong, deep cherry smell.

I do have to say, like a lot of fruit teas, in order for it to live up to how nice it smells, the 2-3 minutes Twinings suggest you brew it might not be enough. It’s still good when it’s delicate, but give it a bit longer and you get a lovely intense fruity brew. The cinnamon takes a back seat really, but adds an extra warmth while the the cherry keeps it light and bright tasting.

So yes, I recommend this one. Go grab a box before it vanishes.

So, I’m up in Glasgow for a couple of days, to see some gigs at Celtic Connections, what is possibly the biggest celebration of traditional music still going in the UK. It’s around 3 weeks long with hundreds of acts all over the city. Sadly, due to workload and things like inconveniently having to graduate, I’m going to miss seeing my favourite acts playing here (Shooglenifty, Peatbog Faeries, Colin McIntire (or Mull Historical Society to you) and the secret GOD of Scottish song writing Michael Mara) but next year I intend to remedy this. OH do I intend to remedy this.

Anyway, enough about me, back to what I was watching last night. Keeping with the sense of humour all the best trad musicians have about the scene, as an antidote to Sunday’s ‘Harp Heaven’, last night there was a show called ‘Accordion Hell’, celebrating… well, the infamous accordion. The musicians were full into the theme and were all bedecked with little devil horns and plenty of damnation jokes. We were treated to 8 mind-blowingly talented accordion players, accompanied by a rather good drummer and an excellent guitarist (who also was an honorary accordion demon for one tune that he had written.) The range of tunes spanned from the bright and high-energy to the beautiful, delicate and moody, to the downright funky. All of it played with style, humour and skill. I think one reason most people hate the instrument is they’ve never heard it in the hands of someone who really knows how to work it, and haven’t seen what an amazing, rich sound one person with a squeezebox can make happen. When the cords and complex melodies get layered up it’s hard to accept it’s just one instrument doing it, and some of the intricate and blisteringly fast finger work that was going on in the concert was just staggering. (Though that’s something else people who have never much been in the folk scene get to see. Sure, some of it can be lacklustre, but we’ve also got some of the most technically brilliant musicians playing in this scene and the level of skill it takes to pull off some of the things they can do is hugely under-estimated.)

So yes, Accordion Hell was fantastic and renewed my appreciation for those can take an instrument used for so much evil and mediocrity and use it for the forces and good and awesome. Brilliant.

‘Hey Hey My My Yo Yo’ Junior Senior
Got on the recommendation of a friend and positive memories of that music video for Move Your Feet with all the pixel art. Anyway, the band is Danish the the album is full of pure hippyhoppy pop FLUFF that is far more infectious than it should be. Really, it’s silly and sugary and unashamedly cheesy and the result is a very fun record who’s opening track, ‘Hip Hop a Lula’ I can’t stop playing and I don’t know why. My version also came with the ep ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ that is also pretty good with a standout opening tune. It’s all very happy and great stuff unless you want to take it too seriously.

‘In Rainbows’ Radiohead
At what should be at the other end of the spectrum, at bloody last the new Radiohead album is in the shops. Ignoring the very interesting hype from before with the pay-what-you-like download fun, I wanted a CD so I waited. Now, as one of those odd people who actually liked Kid A (but that’s because it was the last one I heard so I was ready for it) I don’t mind the weirder directions that Thom Yorke has been taking the band, but… I think In Rainbows has benefited hugely from Thom making his solo album before it. If Hail to the Theif was a little bit of a return to normal after the band had got Kid A/Amnesiac out of their system, In Rainbows is even more so. It’s a bit less tortured as well, but it’s not a complete step backwards either. The results of their experiments shine through all of it, but at the same time there are great tunes going on too. And guitars! Yay! Anyway, I like this one a lot, and absolutely adore the track ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place.’ Good stuff. Now hopefully they won’t make us wait like 3 years for the next one.

‘Hey Venus!’ Super Furry Animals
I could be lazy here and go ‘It’s SFA, of course it’s good’. Because it is. It’s a little more normal guitar pop than Lovekraft but it still has the usual quirks and charm you’d expect from them. (Especially shown in the opening tracks, the first of which is about itself being a Gateway Song to the rest of the album, and the second opening with the spoken lines ‘This song is based on a true story. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t autobiographical’). I do have to admit that none of the songs have yet beaten my fave SFA tracks from other albums, but they are growing on me and some of them are catchy as hell. It doesn’t really push the envolope or anything but it doesn’t need to because it’s still good and gives you pretty much what you want in a Super Furry Animals album. Which would be slightly odd but catchy songs mixing pop and rock sounds and great harmonies with fun synthy twiddles and interesting production. Lovely.

Anyone else been listening to anything interesting?