Found film (I mean, my own film) (Which was never lost but anyway)

I recently started developing film at home again, after a long time away from it. I wanted to get images as grainy looking as possible, and on the advice of the lab technician at John Gunn's in Dublin i developed a couple of rolls to her instructions ie use paper developer, 4/1 for 4 minutes, regardless of the film type or speed. Surprise surprise, I'd labelled some old films wrongly and so went ahead and accidentally double exposed them.

Takashi's return; "21"??

 The photos on this roll of film lay dormant in a drawer for two years with nothing but a "21" scratched neatly into the side of it. I always assumed the 21 meant "21 photos taken" but lo and behold, a fully exposed roll of 36 negatives. So who knows what it meant. Sometimes I think I do this stuff on purpose to introduce minor doubts into my future-self's life. I have actually considered doing such things in the past and for all I, with my atrocious memory, know I have gone through with many of them. It's like I'm living a self-inflicted, boring version of the movie "Memento".

Anyways that aside, I was really excited to discover the bounty contained in that film - photographs of the first house gig Paul and I organised. It was supposed to be the last Fairy Fort gig of the summer, before Takashi went home to Matsue to get going on his plan to open a café. But the gods of that crappy sort of rain that doesn't really rain but just sort of hangs around and clings to everything like a jerk had other plans and the fairy fort had to be abandoned in favour of Paul's sitting room. It was still great! And was the start of a series of really nice house gigs. Takashi's presence in Galway was short-lived but so hugely affected those he met. For me, he completely opened my eyes to the potential in everything: a discarded pipe for a bugle; a bag of crisps on the head for percussion; a field for a concert venue... It's coincidental these photos appear now, as Takashi's coming back at the end of next month and has been in touch recently about doing a tour with a few friends (Darugaries and Rokumantai). Yesss!

Some other out and aboutings:

Several seconds before (by Michelle) (though I'm possibly not right about that)

 

This week

A gig in my house on Saturday, can't wait. Just hope people will make the trek. I'll never ever get tired of this video, and always feel so nostalgic for the Fairy Fort when I watch/listen to it.

FairyFortFour Photovideo

At lengthy last, with the help of Michelle's computer, I've stitched together the photos from the last Fairy Fort night and lined them up and made them play. After much frustration with my own technological limitations I'm relieved to have finally done this. I'm afraid the quality is a bit poor, I tried doing the highest quality at every step but still it ended up pretty blocky. Which is annoying as it really doesn't do Aaron's projections justice at all. Oh well, for now it'll have to do, til I figure out how to make it better (or someone else lends their expertise...)

The song is Yawning Chasm's 'To the Void' - from his 'The Shadow is that Hidden' EP - which is an effortlessly gorgeous tune.

Lights at the Fairy Fort

I wanted to go to the Fairy Fort to make the poster for the last gig with the idea of writing the "Fairy Fort 4" in a variety of lights, so off we went, Barry, Michelle and I in Michelle's car to tramp around in a field waving lights around for a while.

Barry and Michelle wrote their (full) names in the air:

The product of lots of tightly co-ordinated teamwork:

 

Go teamwork!

Jumping in place

Fairy Fort Four

I've been putting off uploading these photographs cos I've been trying the last few days to make them into a sort of animated video thing, which was my original aim of displaying them but my computer just will not comply. So I'm putting a selection up. Hopefully I'll have figured out before too long how to make an animation using Ubuntu that doesn't practically require me to learn how to write code. Also my computer's pretty broken at this stage.

Basically what I did was set up the camera on a tripod (thanks Aaron) at the back of the room, put it on a long exposure with the remote shutter setting and took photos with the little wireless remote during the course of the night. I think there's something like two and a half hours between the first and last photo and about 2oo photos in all. I should have taken more, and annoyingly managed not to get any photos of the first act of the night - an improv set made up of Alice, Takashi, Tony and myself. But Suzanne video-recorded the performance so there'll be that, and it looks excellent.

Aaron offered to project his slides throughout the evening, and a couple of people took turns pressing the clicky to advance them. Amazing photographs. The projector was aimed at the intersection of two walls and the ceiling, giving the already slightly otherworldly images a further disjointedness. And the colours! Beautiful; really and truly I felt privileged seeing them. The selection of photographs posted here generally have a different one of Aaron's projections in each, though I don't think I photographed every slide change.

Music for Dead Birds (Jimmy solo with Alice McDowell)

Yawning Chasm (with TakashiCarré)

After the music

The exposure spanned two slides in this one, hence the nice double-exposure look to the image on the wall.

Towards the end I went around setting off the flash by hand

"Stance gives you Power"

Tony's kiss goodbye

The last one; Tony's holding up a piece of drum equipment, I don't know why. I like that Liam and Takashi are talking to each other in this one, being the two people who created the best music events this city's seen in the last few years. They're even wearing similar jackets!