I Drove All Night. Is That Alright?

Sporadic output from Christian Hardy. a human. Of sorts.
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Christian Silva

—Everybody's Burning Books

Here is a demo from around 2005.

American accent is unforgivable, but my band sound great.

As if we wouldn’t notice.

Dust On The Dancefloor

We didn’t think we’d be able to make a video for our latest single from Into The Murky Water because there was no time and no money.  Then Joseph Brett came along and with nothing more than our Super-8 tour clips wrote a treatment and started making things happen.  

Suddenly we were in a disused office in East London playing along to the song.  Then he disappeared for what must have been an insanely intensive period of editing and post-production.  Then this video appeared.  We love it.  We love him.  

Here are some Joseph Brett links:

http://josephbrett.wordpress.com/

http://www.josephbrett.com/

http://endoftheroadfilms.com/

Timber!

I saw our label mates Timber Timbre perform at Union Chapel in Islington last night.

They were incredible.  

I don’t think I’ve ever seen three musicians execute such an array of sounds so precisely and powerfully before.  It was a masterclass in control, dynamics, being in the song and generally making sublime music.

I went with a great cellist, Becca Mears, who was so taken with the violin playing that she sneaked a photo of the pedal board being used to make all of those sounds.  Praise indeed.

Our cathedrals are our pyramids (and our time machines).

For the last few weeks we’ve been supporting Laura Marling on her tour of some of the UK’s cathedrals.

Aside from the musical experience (intimidating/joyful in equal measure), the tour has been a rare opportunity to explore, unfettered with our AAA passes, these remarkable old buildings, inside and out, and I’ve learned some things:

  1. They make you look up. There is a vertical emphasis in all of them. They point upwards. They’re pointy. They draw your eye up to the sky and dare you to think about whatever you suspect is or isn’t up there.
  2. They shut you up. I’ve not seen many people talking inside them.  I don’t think it’s a false silent reverence either, I think the scale, ultra-intricate detail and beauty just shuts people up.  The way good paintings affect good people.
  3. They’re time machines. When you wander around an 11th century building walking over tombs dedicated to humans who died hundreds of years ago, you can’t help but contemplate time. And death. And all that.
  4. They make people happy. I’ve seen a lot of smiling and content faces in and around the cathedrals.  They have special powers.  They’re extraordinary, unbelievable really, and they make people feel extraordinary as a result. 

All of these things, without exception, also applied to my experiences in Egypt where I visited a bunch of pyramids, temples and tombs.  And as this tour comes to a close, I find myself wondering, as I did in Egypt, why we can’t still create buildings that make people feel extraordinary.  And happy.

Why can’t a functional building also make us weak at the knees?  Light headed?  Giggly?

Frank Gehry gets it. Antoni Gaudi got it.

More importantly, their patrons did too.

I wonder where the next extraordinary building will come from.  And who will pay for it.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Christian Silva

—DGSAWAY Demo 4

Here is a demo of a song I wrote & recorded in 2009 after someone blindsided me.

The violin playing is by my beloved band-mate Mike Siddell and the drumming is my equally beloved band-mate Bas Hankins.  The rest is me.

It’s called Don’t Get Swept Away.

I’m still not sure if he did or not.