I might have been a little worse for wear yesterday. Sunday was a wino-fulled, overly sunny, declarations of love to the sons of old family friends kind of mess of a day. Hence no post AGAIN on a MONDAY. I realise that there is little point in calling it the Monday Mixtape if I am going to forget every week to do it on a Monday.... but hey now, it'll happen one day.
Johnny Flynn is pretty cool. Still not an artist I know a lot about, but this is great song with certain lyrics which might have been applicable to the situation this weekend. I wish I had time to write more, but I am still working through my embarrassment of Sunday afternoon.
I write this post from an Android handset. As trying new things has extended from my personal life (leaving university, living on my own etc), to my work life as well. I shall explain:
Three weeks ago I started a job as a marketing assistant at an interactive media production company that also have a smaller sister company that makes mobile phone applications. I work primarily for this sister company. My previous experience in marketing was at a music label where I did a digital marketing internship last summer. The world of mobile phone apps it seems is a different beast altogether.
While my main interest when it comes to marketing is music, I was not going to pass up a good opportunity to have a job in which I could learn in and develop my marketing skills. But mobile apps is something that I'm definitely still learning more about everyday.
While I can't say that I'm unbiased towards our apps, as a user of them for the first time on my first day of work, I felt that as a user I really did enjoy playing the game app Nano Panda that the company developed. It works on a similar format to other popular game apps, but it has pandas and atoms (did somebody say awesome?!)
While I'm definitely not trying to sell you anything, if you get a chance, try out the free version, it is genuinely a lot of fun.
Aside from playing and marketing the game, I've also learned a lot about how apps (of both the mobile and online (i.e on Facebook) variety) work. Today I spent the day in a studio listening to and providing help for a voice artist in making demo sounds for an internal project. These sounds will then be passed to animators so that the actions of the character match the correct sound. Sounds simple, but the work that these people do to make these apps exciting and innovative is incredible. I feel like I need to do their work justice when it comes to the marketing in order to make everything "worthwhile".
With most jobs like this there comes a perk and this one is no different. My company phone has not only helped me understand mobile apps and phone technology, but weirdly is also helping me with my depth perception issues.
Double win?
I used to be quite closed minded about new technologies: mp3 players, blu-ray, touch screens.etc. but I really think I'm beginning to embrace these things (except maybe blu-ray, I still fail to see the point when DVD players still exist).The fact that I can write this post in a 'Blogger' app proves to me that this type of technology really is the future and that the innovative minds that I work with are going to the ones that take us there.
I hope that having exams, going to interviews, and starting a new job are sufficient excuses for being relatively silent over the last few weeks. Needless to say, I am super tired when I get home from work (hello commute). However, I have been thinking about awesome tracks to put up in the time away and have a few for your listening and visual pleasure now.
There is no denying that songs have stories: whether it's a story within the lyrics that evoke emotion or if it's something that you - the listener - have experienced that the song conveys well. It could also just be a moment in time that you remember well because you were listening to a song that will now forever be remembered because of what was happening in your life.
This first song is not only amazing in its own right - just listen to that main riff in the melody - but I will probably always remember my last trip home from Manchester, you know 'the trip', the last time you'll be a student trip when you say goodbye to your housemates, not knowing when all of you will be together in the same place again. It was the end of an era and I'll always remember Friendly Fires 'In the Hospital' playing as I was driven down the M6 towards London with one of my housemates. Unfortunately I do not have a photo of the unique setup that the van required for us to get home (let's just say it was a two seater van and I was in the back sat on a deskchair between a bicycle and the door).
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Friendly Fires - In the Hospital
The next track is a bit more 'I just like this band/song' of me.
Looking through my albums you might notice that I like a number of bands with the word 'club' in their names: Two Door Cinema Club, Bombay Bicycle Club, and Tokyo Police Club are definitely a threesome that express this. Weirdly, TDCC and TPC have actually toured together; I can only imagine the billboards advertising that might have been a bit of a mouthful to read.
Tokyo Police Club are from Canada and released an impressive second album Elephant Shell. I'm still working through the third one Champ and have yet to determine if I like it as much as the second (the album that increased their visibility). Anyway, 'Tessellate' is from Elephant Shell and is a good example of their sound.
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Tokyo Police Club - Tessellate
This week I discovered turntable.fm, you need to have friends on Facebook that are already registered in order to gain access (an air of exclusivity perhaps... nah, just pretentious). However, it is an amazing amount of fun. I think I wasted 20 minutes of my lunch hour playing on it. I decided to go where most of my friends were which was Katy Simpson's 'Pop Etc.' room. I know Katy from my student radio days (which let's face it, were the other week), and I played a few rounds. You can vote whether you like the song or not and if your song is terrible you get booted off the virtual decks.
So in honour of the awesomeness that was turntable.fm I have added one of Katy's picks, '3 Little Words' by Frankmusik to the mixtape. It is a slight departure from my usual set, but hey it's about 'trying new things'.
