Ian Badcoe Poetry: playlist

Showing posts with label playlist. Show all posts

2018-01-30

New Muses for a Posthuman Age

I follow a filk singer/songwriter called Dr Mary Crowell and on her album: Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour she has a song: Courting My Muse. This track inspired me to write a sonnet sequence about how the Muses might be updated for the 21^st century.

So far, so good, nothing unusual there, I've written sonnet sequences before...

...however when I came to record this, I had a problem. Muses are female and plural, where I am male and singular. So I hatched a plan. I put out a call to various female poetry friends asking them whether they would like to be one of my Muses (I phrased it a little more carefully than that.)

To my delight friends signed up in sufficient numbers to be able to record all nine Muses, plus a group effort for my bonus "Omnes" sonnet that rounds things off at the end, and I was doubly delighted when Mary Crowell leapt at the opportunity to participate (bringing the whole thing full circle...)

I've spent some time editing these together with sound effects and music to complement the poems. I also recorded myself narrating between the various goddesses in my guise as "The Mortal".

I have to say I'm very pleased with the result. There's something uniquely satisfying in hearing talented voices read your work back to you, and it also is also educational, bringing out things in the poems that wouldn't be there in my reading.

Cast in order of appearance:

The Mortal

A man, like any other...

Ian Badcoe

This is my blog you are already reading...
Facebook
Twitter

Calliope

Goddess of Complex Computation and Difficult Projects

Natalie Shaw

Natalie Shaw is a poet who also works for the Government Digital Service. She is @redbaronski on Twitter and writes very occasionally on her blog: https://natalieshawpoems.wordpress.com/

Clio

OMG of Celebrity Gossip and Fan-fic

N Magennis

N Magennis is an author and artist. She lives in Argyll. https://nikkimagennis.com/

Euterpe

Rock Goddess

Amy Kinsman

Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright from Manchester, England. As well as being the founding editor of Riggwelter Press, they are associate editor of Three Drops From A Cauldron and the host of the regular Sheffield-based open mic, Gorilla Poetry. Their debut poetry pamphlet & was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2017 and is due out in April this year.
Facebook
Twitter: @manykinsmen

Erato

Goddess of Personal Development and Self Image

Juliet Anthill

Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull with a SORN'd Fiat Punto and a cat called Alice. She has poems coming out in Magma and Prole this Spring.

Melpomene

Goddess of Heartbreaking News

Dr Mary Crowell

Dr. Mary Crowell is a geeky musician from north Alabama who is very active in the filk community. Her doctorate is in music composition, and she teaches music theory, composition, music appreciation, and piano at a local community college as well as at her home studio. Mary loves to write songs about mythology, gaming, coffee, beagles, and zombies. You can find her gaming album Acolytes of the Machine & Other Gaming Stories (2012) on Pandora Radio. Her latest album (funded by Kickstarter) is Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour (2017).
Patreon
http://marycrowell.com/

Terpsichore

Goddess of Body Modification and Bionics

Jenn Zed (Cyborg Edition)

Ms. Zed is an artist and writer who lives in Bath, England, with her cat. You can view her Portfolio at https://jennzedblog.wordpress.com/

Thallia

Goddess of Lies we tell Ourselves

Rosemary Badcoe

Rosemary Badcoe’s first collection, Drawing a Diagram, is available from Kelsay Books or directly from her. She is editor of the online poetry magazine Antiphon and has been published in a range of magazines.

Urania

Goddess of Space Shots and Surprisingly Distant Robots

Brenda Levy Tate

Brenda celebrates life in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, where she wanders outdoors at midnight, camera and tripod at the ready. She's especially drawn to astrophotography, so Urania is her particular Muse. She was a senior high drama and English teacher for endless years. Now she's a cat lady, poet, occasional singer and cheerful retiree.
Her book: Wingflash
brendatate.com

Polyhymnia

Goddess of Misc.
and Everything
and Holism
and Interdisciplinary Studies
and All That...

Jenn Zed

Biography as above

Credits read by

David Callin

David Callin lives on the Isle of Man.

Additional vocals

Rosemary Badcoe

Sound effects acknowledgements

All sound effects were downloaded from freesound.org under either The Creative Commons Attribution License, The Creative Commons Public domain License, The Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License or The Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. Changes were made such as fading-in and -out, tempo/frequency shifts, noise reduction etc...

The effects used can be found at:

2016-04-26

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London. Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves. Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs. (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died. Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news. We had some cause for introspection. We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both. We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was. After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song. Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working. Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics. Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque? Bowiesian?) ideas. In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?—and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished. It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own. Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one. He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production. He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then... but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...

And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that). This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...

2016-03-25

All of me...

It was easy, so I made a playlist of all my poem recordings.

Maybe you could put it on while you are falling asleep at night. I hope that sends a disturbed shiver down your spine, it certainly does mine...

Actually I can't imagine what anybody will do with this, but here it is anyway.