The Lost Cavalry's Diary

10/12/10 : Post rock Vs Serbian brass

Half of The Lost Cavalry took a trip out west to the All Tomorrows Parties festival at Minehead, Butlins last weekend - the Godspeed You! Black Emperor one... Nick and I are pretty into our post rock, which I think comes over in parts of our music - and certainly in a lot of the music Nick and I recorded before The Lost Cavalry when in Meissner. Usually the great thing about ATP is wandering up to see some band that you've never heard of before, and discovering they are amazing. This time however there seemed to be less that blew me away - and more that you watched for half an hour and then got bored, quite a shame. There were some highlights though - Godspeed of course, and Tindersticks were incredible - really carefully thought out and really together as a band. Deerhoof were great too, to close the festival, but the suprise highlight was the Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar from Serbia - a brass band with some drums and a bit of singing too. They were the hit of the festival - and they could have played all night if the audience had their way!

So now we're all home and I don't know if I want to start a post rock band or learn the trumpet. We have always talked about a post rock side project, so maybe 2011 will be the year - plus I really miss drumming, so maybe I could do that (I used to be the drummer in the band 'Wolfie'). We should concentrate on getting our next EP made though first of course... which we aim to have ready in the first half of next year. We'll probably release a single from it earlier than that too - plus we have some video ideas at the moment which will hopefully work out... as always, lots in the pipeline!

1/11/10 : New music PC

Well, my new music PC arrived - and it's a beast! A huge black rack mounted case that you almost can't lift, with a big grill on the front and a lock. But it's nice and fast and the monitor is nice and big. I also treated myself to Sonar 8.5 Producer edition. Sonar is like Pro Tools or Logic but better (in my opinion!) and I've been using it for a while for recording and mixing. The new version seems pretty good so far.

At the moment I'm mostly concentrating on the Booked Out film music as well as working on The Lost Cavalry's song 'The Tower' - one of our live favourites! It's sounding great, lots of energy and life plus some pretty beautiful sounding stuff twinkling in the background - including this music box. I've also been trying to build a Theremin - from a kit... it's a lot trickier than I expected it to be, it's been too long since I did any soldering. I will post updates as I go!

12/10/10 : Music on the go

Here's my next invention. I doubt it will work.

We're all very excited about releasing our track 'The Elephant Of Castlebar Hill' as a single, we're really pleased with the new mix (which you can listen to here). We're also excited about some new tracks we're recording at the moment. I think it's time to upgrade my little home studio though - I'm going to splash out on a new computer I think before starting to mix the new songs.

I've also been doing some other recording recently - I recorded a track for Sony Extreme music for this production music album which was good fun, and I'm also in the middle of working on the score for a new indie feature film Booked Out along with my co-composer Derek Yau. It's quite a challenge - really different to be writing music that needs to fit in tightly with the film action and also set the right mood - which often changes quite quickly within one piece of music. It is absolutely brilliant fun though and we're making good progress. I think there will be around 45 minutes of music we'll be making in total though, so there's a lot to do. Definitely a good excuse for getting a new music computer...

Mark.x

19/8/10 : LeeFest 2010

At the weekend, Dave, Nick and I went to LeeFest down in Kent, a one-day festival headlined by Futureheads. We were there in the role of 'Wandering Minstrels' and so, despite the rain, we wandered the festival arena and played our songs to the people, even if they didn't want us to, or didn't know what on earth was going on. In fact, most people loved it and everyone seemed to want to have a go on my concertina.