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'.
Today I was offered my first 'real' job as a marketing assistant in an interactive media company. I start next week and I'm very much so looking forward to this new step in my life. As I was getting the tube to the interview (hello long commute across London), a track popped up on my mp3 player that reminded me that even if this opportunity didn't work out for me, everything would eventually fall into place, much like it did with university three years ago (that was an ordeal if I ever saw one).
So for all my friends that are currently panicking about finding jobs/internships, or for those that are just trying to figure out life. It's going to be ok and you will eventually find yourself doing what your supposed to be doing, it might just take a bit of time.
Yesterday I finished my last exam for my undergraduate degree. Three years of university have gone by incredibly quickly and right now I'm living in a period of uncertainty since I have no set plans (so far) for the remainder of the year.
While I know that ultimately I should be celebrating, I've decided to spend a couple of hours tackling these binders - throwing away notes that I no longer need and keeping essays that I'm proud of.
Well after the last week I've had it would be a mere lie about my musical listening life to post anything but a Two Door Cinema Club track. Recently reentering my life over the last week I have fallen in love all over again with an album that got lost in the mix about eight months back. Tourist History defines Two Door Cinema Club's sound, however, in the eighteen months since it's release I can only assume that there has been much more growth musically and lyrically. Some of this is displayed on a track 'Kids' which can be found on the deluxe version of Tourist History (worth every penny of its £8 pricetag). I eagerly await their next effort.
Given that I live in London and most bands that tour the UK will ultimately gig there, going to Radio One's Big Weekend was a pretty special experience. For those that have never heard of The Big Weekend, the idea is that BBC Radio One take a weekend festival to different locations across the UK, usually to places which don't have large concert venues and are often left off the map for inter/national tours. There are only 20,000 tickets available for each day and usually over 75,000 applications are sent in. To say that I was lucky to get tickets for BOTH days is an understatement.
My friends from Fuse Fm and I got our tickets through the Radio Academy Masterclass. The Masterclass is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to get into radio as a career. Throughout the day of lectures you meet some influential people and get to pick their brains for any information that might help you break into radio. While radio is not really my passion in life it has been important to me in the last three years as it something that has allowed me to develop skills within an area that I would like to branch out into career wise - marketing.
Anyway, it was an interesting weekend to say the least. Because of the Masterclass taking up 4 hours into festival time, we unfortunately missed the Arctic Monkeys set. However despite this we still saw the Foo Fighters headlining as well as Swedish House Mafia. Both sets were good for different reasons: Foo Fighters were good because they knew that the audience was mostly Foo Fighters illiterate and gave them the 'for dummies' set - a good mix of old and new tracks. A number people had hyped up Swedish House Mafia for me throughout the day and I was pleasantly surprised that I got quite into the set despite never really liking house music.
The odd thing was that the most fun I probably had that day, perhaps even over the weekend was during a Pete Tong set on the outdoor stage. Absolutely high on life and the atmosphere, it was just ridiculous.
Come Sunday and it was much more my scene on the In New Music We Trust Stage: Two Door Cinema Club, Noah and the Whale, and The Strokes.
Two Door Cinema Club
Two Door Cinema Club are a band that I've known of for about a year and a bit, but only began to love quite recently. With only one album under their belt, and five singles (one released three times in 18 months), they - in my opinion - are only going to get better.
Some might argue that seeing the same band twice in two weeks is excessive. I say that it's awesome. Especially when it's my favourite band - Noah and the Whale. They played a good range of stuff across their three albums. While I can't say anything bad about these guys in regards to their music, it would be nice if they could play more stuff from First Days of Spring in their festival set.
Noah and The Whale
After side-stepping to the main stage to reclaim my youth while listening to My Chemical Romance for twenty minutes, we returned to watch a pretty decent set by The Strokes in the INMWT stage. I like the Strokes, I do, but they are a band that I often forget that I like and I usually have to be in a very 'Strokes' mood in order to sit down and listen to them. I did however really enjoy their set and since last weekend I have been making the effort to listen again.
The Strokes
In all I think there were a couple of highlights, musically there was nothing extraordinary about Two Door Cinema Club, but with their set came the push I needed in order to get back into loving their album. Additionally the other highlight was just having one final Fuse send off before I graduate. Fuse has been a big part of my life for the last three years and I think it was good to end on a high.
