Aaaah, December.

I've been rather lazy lately. Its been a while since I last blogged, at least a good while before Christmas. Um.. Sorry about that.

I went to watch Avatar today.
Well, the CG stuff is mind blowingly beautiful, and the 3D was damn cool, but other than that, lets just say, if you find yourself at a cinema trying to decide what to watch sometime this summer, maybe go for Twilight.
Yeah. That boring.

Other than that, since I've been back in Durban I've been working some crappy jobs, eating a LOT of great Christmas food, reading some interesting stuff, writing songs, playing ping pong and a lot of other things that I might deem interesting enough to tell you about sometime in the week.

But until then I have only this to share:
http://www.myspace.com/hiroshimasunrise



Yesterday (or the day before maybe) I did a little work on my Myspace page. Its really simple with a nice little header, but really, I can't stand flashy Myspace band pages so that's that.

So if you've never heard my songs, or you want to add me as a friend (please?), or whatever, go have a look see.

Just a thought..

I love the name "Club Sandwich".

To me it implies that the Ham, Chicken and Roast Beef all got together one day and formed a club, the sole purpose of which was to celebrate their own deliciousness and satisfy my need for said deliciousness.

They have regular meetings in my stomach to which they drive in their wonderful little Subway busses.

Also, three animals in one sammich! Win.

This is The Sound of Settling:

Bapba. Bapba.


Children under sixteen must be accompanied by an adult. No braais. No coarse language. No washing of clothes. Correct bathing costumes must be worn at all times. No running around the pool screaming.

I miss you.

Kokstad

On my way up to East London, for some reason (I think to look for a pharmacy for aspirin or something) we decided to drive into Kokstad instead of simply stopping at the Ultra City as we usually would. I enjoyed it though, because there are actually some rather lovely old buildings there, including the old town hall and library:




And a couple of others I found quite interesting:



Also, I think this town could win some sort of award for most churches on one street, because there are one heaven of a lot of them! All with their own little charm about them:

New scatch pad. Wiki wiki

With all the craziness of the last couple weeks, I totally forgot about something totally awesome I did before I went to Jo'burg..


A little while ago I watched a rad little band from Amsterdam called Voist play at Burn Nightclub. Apart from being a really great band, the guitarist had a rather beautiful fender Tele' with a scratch pad cut out of a vinyl record. I'm not sure if he did it himself, or had it made, but I thought it was really cool, so since my scratch pad on my guitar was pretty much completely wrecked, I decided to try and make one for myself.

It was a bit harder than I thought it would be. I had trouble tracing any sort of shape onto the records, and after completely destroying one with a jigsaw, I had to cut it out with a blunt little junior hacksaw.


I might do it again when I feel so inclined, but apart from one small crack and a few miss-measured screw holes it came out pretty great..

Raindrops and Sunshowers

Ok, first real post in about two weeks. Here goes:

Bad news first, the good will follow.

I left Jo'burg on Tuesday and got home just in time to pack a bag and get a few hours of sleep before leaving again. This time I drove up to East London with my parents for my Grandad's funeral. He died the previous Saturday morning and the service was last Thursday. As can be expected, it was quite a sad couple of days, but it was a very nice service, my dad gave a very moving eulogy, and I was a pallbearer. He'd been sick for a long time, so at risk of being totally cliched, I can only say he's happier now.

Driving through the Transkei in the rain was quite lovely. A had a bit of a reflective time in the back seat, and if you could take a look at my thoughts that afternoon, they'd probably look a little like this:






and they'd probably sound a little like this.

One of my favourite bands at moment, White Lies, sing a line that goes:

I leave my memoirs in blood on the floor
And my fears with the nurse on the stairs.
I'm only going where you'll be someday,
So don't say rest in peace in your prayers.

See you soon Grandad. Fare thee well.

Miss me?

I've been away for a little while, and a lot's happened since my last post. Right now I'm pretty tired from traveling and not in the greatest of moods so I'm off to have a nap, but details are coming.

For now I thought I'd share something I though quite profound that I saw on my way back from Jo'burg. Maybe its a little cheesy, but here goes:

For non South Africans, vrede means peace, but it also happens to be a little town in Gauteng. And that's my shoe in the front window of the bus I was traveling on.

Since then, I've been to a funeral, seen some pretty old buildings, listened to a lot of sad music, introduced my dad to indie rock 'n roll and started writing a new little song that's turning out to be about as much about Jo'burg as the last one was about Pretoria...

Smile Like You Mean It

 
Tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock I will be stepping onto a bus at Durban station, and sitting on that bus till 4 o'clock when it arrives in Jo'burg, all because by 6 o'clock tomorrow night I'll be at the Coca Cola Dome, waiting with baited breath for Zebra and Giraffe to start playing because when they're finished, the Killers come on.

Stoke face.

I can't express my excitement in words. The Killers are one of my absolute favourite bands. I've loved them from the first time Barney Simon played Mr Brightside on the Night Zoo and even stuck with them when everyone else played it on repeat for months. They truly are a great band.

Suffice to say you're unlikely to hear anything from me for about a week or so. I'll be up in Gauteng with a few friends. I promise to reply to e-mails and everything else when I get back, which will probably be sometime around the 10th.

Sala kahle

  

We have a tradition amoungst my friends of holding Gentlemen's Evenings every few months. Suits. Poker. Whiskey. We had one last night, so I'll put more photos up when I get back, but for now check out the set on Flickr.

Kiss me, Kate

These past two days I've developed a new little guilty pleasure:

Youtube channel of the beautiful and very talented Kate McGill. She has some rather pretty originals, but she's attracted quite some attention for her huge collection of covers by popular artists, such as Kids by MGMT. She also sings a lot of less well known stuff, like a Blood Bank cover by Bon Iver that makes me want to swim across the Atlantic ocean to England for her.

Ahem.

So go check her stuff out, but don't watch too many, and don't look into her eyes, or you'll never leave.

In other news, I watched New Moon yesterday. Its certainly not totally aweful, but you will cringe at some of the CG and you will want to kill Bella. Totally unstable. Also, Robert Pattinson makes it more and more obvious just how much he hates being tween-vampire-romance-fantasy poster boy.

I do think I want to go and buy a few V-necked shirts and a cool blazer though. Seems chicks dig it.

Qwerty

This is something a little different from my usual sort of folk acoustic stuff. Sometime last year I started developing a bit of an interest in electronic music. Its a whole lot of fun to make and I've got mad respect for producers in just about any genre.

Anyway. This is one of my very first attempts at anything remotely electro. Its got a sort of jazzy/deep house feel to start with but it jumps all over the place. Pretty cheesy most of the time, but in my defense I had no idea what I was doing.


(RSS/Facebook Link.)

I have subsequently done a few more tracks, some of which I might just share with you one day.

In other news, I spend a fair portion of my weekend listening to Bombay Bicycle Club. I've had their album about 4 months now, I still can't get over these guys. They really are the shizzle. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I'm one of two people in this country that actually owns their first album, the other being my friend nick.

You're gonna have to order it, but they're well worth it.

Ah, Nostalgia!

The strangest thing has been happening lately. A whole lot of people from Brazil/Argentina/the Mediterranean have been joining my old high school garage band's fan group on Facebook. There's literally been no activity on the page since 13 January 2008, and the band's been pretty much dissolved since before then even, so it's pretty odd.

It did get me reminiscing a little though, and I had a look around and pulled out a couple of old recordings and gig-flyers.

First ever 'gig'. A church battle of the bands. We had a few songs, long fringes and a lot of friends (read: rent-a-crowd). We even got a girl's bra thrown on stage at one point, which is pretty impressive for a rock show in a church hall I must say.

We sounded exactly as you would expect a high school garage band to sound. A little bit of punk, a little bit of rock, some grundge and metal and hardcore and indie thrown in too. You get the idea. This was recorded two years ago at my 18th birthday party.


(RSS/Facebook link)

My party. My band playing. Pretty sweet.

At some stage we had some free time and set up some mic's and did a terrible little demo recording. The Seul est the Wolf Demo contains classics like Mink:


(RSS/Facebook link)

..and a few others, such as this little improv:


(RSS/Facebook link)

Suffice to say its been a while since we've played any shows, and the Durban music scene is probably all the better for that decision. The last nail in the coffin of EC came on the 9th of July 2008 when, with a slight line up change and a new name (CMYK) we played our small repertoire of songs with our friends Lieutenant Vinyl and The Ranks at Big Wednesday.

Onto bigger and better things: I am working on material for a new band with Tyler, who played bass in EC, and Sean, who joined us on guitar for CMYK. We're moving towards a very dance-punk inspired form of indie rock 'n roll that should have Durban dancing and smiling as soon as we get our act together.

I'm certainly excited.

The Way Politics Should Be

I got a rather interesting e-mail today..

Email-1
Google Wave-0

...Anyway, I'm not usually one to join in on political debates, but this information is so vitally important I felt I needed to convey it to as many people as I possibly could.

What am I talking about?

Heck yeah!

I must say, when I saw this, I wasn't totally convinced it could be real, since I'd never actually heard anything about Aimee Franklin before. We've certainly heard enough from Julius Malema mind you. But, that's her. She's compassionate, morally upstanding, intelligent and productive. She's done a whole bunch of super rad things. But mostly she's a legitimate hottie.

Hell, I'd vote her for president.

Facebook Connect, Twitter and Social Bookmarking

I had nothing much to do yesterday afternoon, so I took some time to do some construction on this blog.. If you're reading via RSS/Facebook, come check it out! I did a little bit of fiddling with the blog template, but not much. I mostly just added some pretty buttons down the side and removed the cheesy box thing from the header. This did however teach me that I have absolutely no future in web design, since I have NO idea how to do CSS/Javascript, and my html is even pretty weak. Nothing I didn't know though.

Onto the exciting stuff..

I've seen a lot of sites lately using the Facebook Connect and Twitter comment features. I've been pretty keen to set these up for a while, but I assumed it would take a long time since it'd need a whole lot of coding (see above).

But its actually ridiculously simple. Even for someone like me.

This website has all you need to convert your regular comment section into a powerful multi-platform Disqus comment form. It works great for Blogger, and will work on Wordpress, Tumblr, and just about anything else you have.

And it looks great too!

There are a couple of other way's to set these services up, but I think that Disqus is by far the best.

Another little tweak was the addition of some pretty sexy social bookmarking buttons to the ends of my posts (Wink wink, nudge nudge) created by Naeem.

I also recently uploaded a couple of songs onto Last.fm, so if you use their service, give us a Shout, or even if you don't, you can listen to and download some of my stuff for free right HERE.

The Ncalukeni Cowboy

My dad got back yesterday from Kei Mouth, in the Transkei, where my grandparents used to live. My grandad's getting quite frail, so he's been living in a home in East London, and my dad went to clean out the Kei Mouth house with my uncle and divide up some of the furniture and other valuables between themselves, because they want to rent it out in December.

Its a simple enough house, but its got absolutely phenomenal views of the Kei River mouth, the sea and the Eastern Cape hills, so its a really beautiful place.

They had some really great old stuff too, so last night my dad arrived with boxes and boxes of things he didn't want damaged over the holidays.

And there's more coming sometime this week on a truck.

The point of this story however, is not what he did find, but what he didn't. As I was looking through all the boxes I found a whole lot of old bullets, and, since my family has never owned any guns, I asked him what they were for..

Now, my great grandfather was the bank manager in a town in the Eastern Cape, I'm not too sure which, but either way, he was pretty cool. When he was appointed, because they were obviously pretty bad-ass back then, he was given a gun:

An ivory-handled, long barreled, Smith & Western six shooter.

Up until about five years ago, it would have been in one of the boxes, amongst family crests and WWII air-force medals, sitting on my dining room floor. Unfortunately however, a new law was passed a little while ago requiring everyone who owned firearms of any sort to either register them, or hand them in at their nearest police station. So, since my grandad couldn't be bothered to register it, this beautiful piece of history is lost for ever, probably sitting on the desk of some Transkei police captain.

I like to thing however, that some corrupt cop sold it to an Eastern Cape gangster and now, known as the Ncalukeni Cowboy, he instills fear in the hears of his enemies with his beautiful, brightly polished, ivory-handled six shooter.

I Know there's a Better Way

Yes dear people, some more music:


(As always, if you're reading via RSS/Facebook click HERE for the flash player)

This was my first attempt at the sort of layered approach to vocals that a few of the artists I listen to tend to favour, and that I really love. I did this one a little while ago actually, so if you've read my old Wordpress its probably gonna sound familiar, but its one of my favourites of the songs I've written recently.

There's a little verse section in Zulu, so for those not from SA, it's basically just: "Hello, how are you?", but it just represents everything I love about walking around the streets in my neighborhood, or just about anywhere in this country (yes, you can walk around on the streets), because, in the Zulu culture, and the Xhosa culture especially, the people are a lot more friendly and respectful, and a lot more likely to great you when you walk past, even if you don't know them. Its great.

I was reminded of this song, because I've been reading Rob Bell these past couple weeks, and he talks a lot about a "better way" of living, and the sort of spiritual aspects of nature and the world around us that I was trying to express in this song. If you haven't read his stuff, I highly recommend both Velvet Elvis, and Sex God. Very interesting reads. There's some controversial stuff that you may have to take with a pinch of salt, but most of it is very good.

Johannesburg, Facial hair and Clapham Grand

Its been quite a while since my last post, so this is going to be one of those long, boring, wordy catch up ones. I've been extremely busy with work, but since I officially finished Varsity for the year yesterday (assuming I don't have any sups to write) it looks like I'll have a lot more time on my hands, which means a lot more internetz.

So apart from work (which is super boring), some other things have been going on. I've written some new stuff, so that'll be up once I get round to doing some recordings; my moustache has grown considerably; and its two weeks today until I see the Killers in Jo'burg! Woooo! Excitement. I'll be staying with a friend of a friend who I have never met, but I assume she's awesome, because she takes some rather lovely photographs.

Mo Bro

The other night I went to Clapham Grand, a club in Durban. I'm certainly not a big clubber, partly because none of the clubs here play the sort of music I listen to, and partly because I've tended to do things I regret at these sorts of places, but I seem to have grown out of that.

Back to Clapham.

My first impression was so totally surreal that I almost turned around and walked right out. The DJ was playing Lady Gaga, hands were raised towards the speakers in the classic I-hear-you-and-I-like-what-you're-doing dance move, and on the two massive big screens above the dance floor, the Rugby was showing. It was magical

I realised as I was walking around, looking for somewhere to get a beer, that the past two years of studying Architecture have pretty much taken over the way I think about just about everything! I found myself analysing the whole place. Firstly, the dance floor is tiled. This is perhaps the worst design choice. It wasn't a particularly wet night, but somehow there was a wet, muddy layer across the whole floor. It was so bad that a cleaner had to wander around all night with a mop, wiping up the mess. As you can imagine, the floor was also rather slippery, which of course, is not cool.

The tiles are complemented by a raised, carpeted bar area just behind the dance floor. Yes, carpet. I would hate to see that carpet in the day light. It actually stuck to my feet as I walked. Enough said. The space between the bar counter and railing that surrounds the dance floor is a narrow corridor of maybe 1 and a half metres max. That's a generous estimate. Now add bar stools and people leaning against the railing on the other side. Now try and get two way traffic to and from the bathrooms past them. Not good. It does however have a rather nice upstairs area, and the wall paper and panels on the walls are super cool.

Its also got a great atmosphere. Its 20 for guys and 18 for girls, which means there's a lot less unnecessary in-your-face hook ups, drunken stumblers, and no stupid fights. I had quite a good time actually. Certainly don't see myself becoming a regular of "The Clap" though.

Sugarcane Fires

Its nine o'clock on a thursday morning, and I find myself in the lan at varsity desprerately trying to amuse myself. I wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for an irritating little issue with our exam on Monday that I need to try and sort out. Total waste of time.

So, as usual, I turn to my greatest procrastination tool: blogging.

I thought I'd share my second recording from last week with you. Like THIS one, I used the webcam mic instead of my proper microphone, and did some extra, Justin Vernon inspired, layering of guitars and vocals, with some piano and other stuff thrown in.


(Click HERE if the player isn't showing)

Its one of the most spiritually themed songs I've written in a while, but is mostly about the sugarcane fields that used to grow all over the hills around where I live, that have subsequently been replaced with residential development. Whenever the cane was harvested, they would burn away all the extra chaff to expose only the sugary stems, which would cover all the houses near by in a thin layer of ash a lot like burn newspaper. Its about laying off whats not important, and getting to the sweet stuff in the middle.

Let me know what you think..

Ever The Pedestrian..

These past few days, I've found myself thrown headfirst into girl-world. Its a scary place. A lot of emotion. I mean a lot. I've always thought of myself as, for lack of a better term, something of a sensitive guy, but this pushed me far out of my comfort zone. The details are unimportant, but all I can say is, although the whole Men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus thing is a bit of a cliché, it really is true, and men don't realise that just about everything we say or do has an emotional implication to the women around us.

A word of advice, there are three things that one should not talk about in polite company; religion, politics, and Twilight.

I took a rather long walk today to sort some stuff out and thought I'd share some of my surroundings with you good people of the internet:

Yeah, so the edits are rather cheesy, but I was having fun alright!

Also, a little earlier a friend of mine sent me something that quite nearly made me wet myself.
If you want a good laugh check THIS out!
The second song on the play-list's an absolute killer.

Umhlanga Mixed Use Photos 3

Ok, Third (and last) post of photos from my awesome little roof top exploration mission. The other two are HERE and HERE.

Here's something really rad that I noticed. I'd always thought the big metal circular things were just (perhaps somewhat unattractive) decorative corner articulation elements, but it turn out they have a pretty interesting functional use...

...lightning conductors. That steel cable goes all the way round the roof of the building before running down to earth.

Well I thought that was pretty clever. Anyway..

Liewe Pretoria

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently went to Pretoria, for the Architecture Students' Congress 2009, and much to my surprise had really loved the city. Its probably mostly to do with the whole atmosphere of the conference, but when I got home it just kind of felt like there was a little something missing, and as cheesy as this sounds, I started writing a bit of a love song for the city.

I'll always love Durban more though.



(Click HERE if the player isn't showing)


When I sat down to record this, something pretty strange happened: so far, I've always used my proper vocal mic for recording, its not a great microphone, but its an SM58 clone, and it sounds pretty decent, but this time round I mistakenly forgot to change the audio input setting on my PC and, completely accidentally at first, ended up using the internal mic in my little webcam. I only noticed this was happening when it came to recording the piano bits, because I was getting background noises (my chair creaking, breathing, etc.) in the recording, which was very strange since I'd lined my keyboard directly into the mic-input at the back of my PC.

I ended up recording everything with the webcam though, because it actually has a whole lot less buzz than the microphone was giving me, and gives quite a nice natural reverb. It was also pretty fun to just stand and sing out into the room rather than holding a mic.

I used the same technique on a second song that I'll put up soonish. Comments/crit would be appreciated.

A Pinch and a Punch

Woohoo! 1st of the month. I have my internet back!

Unfortunately, here in South Africa Broadband internet is something of a luxury, so I've been cappedfor the last few days. But I'm back now.
Sweet!

Even more importantly than this, today marks the start of the glorious month of November Movember. For those of you who haven't heard of it, and can't be bothered to read through the Wikipedia article linked above, Movember is a month long event celebrating that most manly of arts, the growing of facial hair, specifically: Moustaches. The pure awesomeness of moustaches is not the soul purpose of Movember, but rather to raise awareness for mens health issues such as prostate cancer.

Last year I tried rather unsuccessfully to accept the mo-challenge, but found my manliness lacking.
This year however, I started nearly a month in advance so that I could grow out a full beard and shave the reveal the 'stache in all its radiant, Starsky and Hutch, Ron Burgundy glory.

 

Its ON!

Far Away From Any Road...

I've been listening to the new Brand New album over the past couple days. Man its awesome! Wow. I'm loving me. Its actually a really heavy album (especially compared to The Devil and God..) which, a little surprisingly at first, got me really amped! Its been a while since I listened to anything in this sort of vein of music, but its rad, 'cos its prompted me to pull out some of my other old post hardcore kind of stuff, so my Brand New play-list has been complemented this week by a bit of mewithoutYou, some Underoath, even some Norma Jean.

Don't think I'm quite ready for Bane or Terror mind you.

But Daisy's definitely worth a listen.. Do it!

Sketch-book scan courtesy of a particularly boring Theory of Structures lecture. I've been sitting in the back row of a lot of lectures lately. Actually I've generally been taking life way too easy these past couple of weeks. I think the apparent nearness of the end of this year has lulled me into some sort of false sense of security, which is a very dangerous place to be when you have a portfolio presentation in just under three weeks time. Most importantly, I really need to pick up my socks and finish this model!

Gosh!

One more thing. If you're reading this on Facebook, welcome!

Yeah, I uploaded the blog to FB today. Its actually really simple, you just enter the RSS/atom feed address, and it does it all for you. Stoked!

You can find the real thing at http://hiroshimasunrise.blogspot.com

Blah Blah Fishpaste

I write a fair bit of music in my spare time. I sing and play guitar in a little Indie rock band that was called CMYK, and is now without a name. I also write A LOT of acoustic stuff. Generally whenever I have free time, or I'm taking a break from work I'll pick up my guitar and play, and since I don't know a lot of songs and have pretty much forgotten all of the ones I learn when I first started playing guitar, I mostly just sit and jam. You can find some of my little home recordings via the Myspace "Music" link at the top of the page.

This is just a little clip of something I've been working on for a little bit. It stated out as a little two guitar instrumental thing for a video a friend of mine had to do for his multimedia marketing (or something like that) course, an advert for Redrow Fishpaste. I started playing around with effects and adding some vocal layers and things and it turned into this:


(Click HERE if the player isn't showing)

It may turn into a song of some sort, it may not, but it was pretty fun to do..

I used Audacity, an open source sound recorder, to make it (Still gotta do some more fiddling with the settinbg to get rid of the buzz) and Zoopy.com, a South African media hosting service (Local is Lekka!) to stream.

Umhlanga Mixed Use Photos 2

This is a follow up to a previous post, about a precedent study I did for Varsity on mixed use buildings. These are part of a collection of photos I took in Umhlanga: