Monday 21 October 2013

Latest News and Views 21/10/2013

1)   The End of Summer…. Second draft of the book is now complete. I have now passed copies over to selected parties for comments before I decide whether to do a third draft or start submitting. Either way, I can’t see this being ready until the start of next year now.

2)   I have now started co writing a poetry book with a young poet called Amy. Work is in the early stages, but there’s currently around 10 or so poems complete and Amy is in the middle of three more pieces. All of the 10 or so pieces are still works in progress, I feel to a degree but Amy has done really well with the material so far and for such a young writer is doing really well.

3)   Work I think is going to start on a piece with P.R. Mcdowell called Twisted Promise II, which will follow on from the original piece.

4)   Probably for 2015, me and a Oldham based (currently) poet called Nick Armbister  have started work on a book of more war based poetry, in my case picking out stories which are perhaps less well known focusing on what war does to people’s lives. I believe Nick has wrote three pieces for this book, while I have just done my second. When I get chance, I will sit down and start research for a third

5)   As blogged early, work is now underway for the annual DIH and friends @ Christmas 2013 album. I have wrote my lyrics for the DIH piece, which may well end up doing a duet with July Skies, but watch this space.

6)   I headlined Write Out Bolton last night and did a good set I felt of mostly stuff from ‘The End of Summer’. However, with the landscape changing in Manchester on the Poetry open mike scene, this will likely be the last one I do for some time now for the rest of this year certainly and maybe beyond until my book is done, and then I may pop out to a few and see the wind blows with things.

7)   A Means to an End played Salford Music Festival at the end of September, which was probably our best gig to date. We are down for a night called Beatification in Mid November (more details to follow) and a charity do in December.

8)  I have been playing round with my midi keyboard a lot at Jeff’s last night and it sounded smashing, so this defo will start getting used more and more in live sets and once we get Jeff’s laptop recording proper, we are going to start recording some EP’s and maybe more.

Sunday 6 October 2013

DIH and friends @ Christmas 2013 Submissions wanted.













As some as you know my underground band / noise supergroup DIH (or Distorted in Hindsight to give its full name) have produced some quite noisy and brutal spoken word based albums over the years.
In 2002, for a one off joke as a side project for Christmas, I decided with the help of a few friends decided to do in album in the space of half an hour (as was the original plan) where we would crippled, murder and take the piss out of as many songs as we could.
By the time we got to 2003, as is the nature of the beast with this kind of things, things snowballed and it had become officially a DIH project (with Keith and Clara onboard of course) where between the three of us with an ever increasing cast play around with the myth of the Christmas which will often be funny and sad sometimes within the same breath.
To date, the music within these albums have contained anything from singer / songwriter stuff, Brian eno tributes, full on noise, Christmas carols, mashups with the aim to see how many tracks we can bootleg into oen tracks, Aphex twin type crunchers, spoken word and anything else we can throw into the kitchen sink
The music contained within this series of albums are varied and can vary from acoustic singer songwriter stuff to music that could appeal to fans of Aphex Twin, fans of the spoken word all designed to make people think and challenge them as much as we can.
Although DIH as a band is quiet nowadays, the Christmas project is still ongoing and is now accepting submissions for it’s now 12th year of submissions and would like people  to submit whatever they feel like submitting on mp3 etc for inclusion on a to be uploaded Christmas albums viva HICC.
More can be read here (http://www.digitalvomit.com/dih-and-friends) or more details can be reached through me (Andy N) on aen1mpo@yahoo.co.uk
Closing date will be around 7th December 2013 although I may extend it.