Chilling in three days time...

Ever since Breakout's birthday flop back in June, which completely wiped out my somewhat limited savings, I had ruled out any chance of a holiday or festival this year. You can imagine my bitter envy when constantly skint Breakout co-promoter Bevan managed to blag himself a free ticket to this forthcoming weekend's Big Chill festival, when Massive Attack's Daddy G asked his girlfriend Rosie if she would be able to go and look after his kids for the weekend.

Yesterday I decided to email the Big Chill organisers as I'd been advised they still had some jobs going. To cut a long story short, I am now the king blagger! In exchange for two eight-hour shifts selling car-parking tickets, which will be done and dusted by 6pm on the Friday (well in time for the Cinematic Orchestra, Kruder & Dorfmeister, DJ Marky etc), I have managed to secure myself a weekend pass valued at £135.

But wait - there's more...

I even get paid for the work! £80 cash in hand to see me through the rest of the festival.

Winner!

Of course, with any great piece of news like that there has to be a downside. Mine poses quite a significant problem. Basically the final piece of work for my qualification is due in on Tuesday - the day after my return.

The sensible thing to do would be to contact the organisers and explain that I won't be able to go after all. However, I have decided to go for the far less sensible option of writing a four thousand word assignment, from scratch, in the next two days before I leave.

This does mean that I won't have time to blog about the Bristol Boat Regatta for another week or so - but it should be a good one. Meanwhile, I am trying to finish writing this before I go to bed so that I can concentrate on my assignment, and then chill (big-style) for the weekend, safe in the knowledge that I have not let this blog slip to a three-weekly update.

It's now 2am and I fear I am starting to ramble, so I shall finish by posting a link to my latest tune - a remix of Bob Marley & the Wailer's 'Nice Time'. I've got my fingers crossed for this one - in fact I sent it to Aries a few days ago and he was impressed but said he couldn't afford to clear Bob Marley samples on his label - however he said he would send it round a few bootleg labels for me, and separately from that last week's Breakout smash 'the Upfull Rockers' are already in the process of remixing it...

Morph vs. Marley - Nice Time [07-2007].mp3

Night.

Ashton Court Festival 2007

There was one small technicality around this year's event that almost seemed insignificant, but that I couldn't help thinking was rather pertinent.

The festival has been renamed.

Yes, it is now *officially* called 'Ashton Court Festival'. In previous years, despite the fact that everyone knew it as Ashton Court Festival, it was in fact officially named the 'Bristol Community Festival', however this year's late battle to obtain a license for the event (with significant restrictions) has finally ended the Bristol Community Festival that we all knew and loved, dare I say it, for good.

I suppose the new restrictions (sound limits, no alcohol allowed in, limited to 30,000 people, finish by 10pm) basically enforced the organisers to move the festival site down the hill to a smaller site (where the car parks used to be), so it all felt a lot more compact. It also resulted in a £15 admission fee, so hardly the 'Biggest free festival in Europe' accolade that was claimed when I first started going back in 1993.



The turn-out was pretty average compared to some previous years, with lots of people boycotting it due to the inflated entrance fee, so the 30000 capacity was never an issue.



Some Ashton Court traditions will never die though, like bumping into random old college friends that you haven's seen for years...



The ground was considerably more brown than green...



That was my one brief visit to the main stage, but it was much the same across the festival site and lots of people had brown marks on their buttocks.







Despite 'not being the same', that chilled out Bristol festival vibe was still strong, and as the day went on it was easy to forget that things were any different, apart from the view of course.











My horn-blowing friend Jon was on the amphitheatre stage with drumnbass band 'Dr Meaker' in the late afternoon. I had heard that the Glastonbury dance tent crowd were left screaming for more last month, so I was keen to finally see them play. Unfortunately the first half of their set was spent queuing for beer, but the second half didn't disappoint...









This cheeky extra last tune was the highlight of my day. I could see Clive Meaker saying 'We have to do it mate, we just have to do it!' to the bloke behind scenes.



Of course in keeping with our 'summer' so far, the clouds soon came, however remarkably it remained dry...









In fact, the clouds made for a cracking sunset, so another Ashton Court tradition was upheld...







The Quantic DJ set on the 'big top' stage could barely be heard from about thirty yards back. In fact, we didn't even realise he'd started until about half an hour into his set. We managed to get in a little closer in time for the Mad Professor...





It was all about nodding that head...





The rain finally came on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning word quickly spread that the festival site was a washout and had to be cancelled. At least that made my decision for me about whether to pay another £15 just to see Horace Andy - if only they'd billed him on the Saturday.

Confirmation

Yes it's really happening. My first release (Kubiks & Morph - Inflicted) is due out later this year! I spotted this earlier today on the Phunkfiction myspace...



Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the track on here for obvious reasons, however I was allowed to put a two minute snippet on my myspace. Kubiks has basically re-written the entire beat and bass line for the release, but he kept in nearly all of my original sounds and I'm really pleased with the final collaboration. To use the label owner's words, "It's deep man."

Kubiks has apparently told the label owner that I would be a good asset for the future of the label. He explained that he had said this because I have good ideas.

"Good ideas make good tunes, the mix will come with time", he added.

Clearly I am really chuffed with the accolade, although I must admit that deep down I'm a little frustrated that I still have so much to learn about the overall art of production before I'll be able to make tunes strong enough for a solo release. The learning curve seems to have suddenly become very steep again, and I wish I had more time to devote to climbing it.

Below is a link to my reworked version of the original track, which is what Kubiks had helped me with during the two-hour studio session. Ironically I've had a couple of people saying that they prefer my version to the colab that's being released. Obviously they know nothing about drumnbass, but it's still nice!

Morph - Inflicted (Reworked) [06-2007].mp3

After a dissapointing 1st Birthday party for Breakout where just about everything that could go wrong, did, we've had some exciting news ahead of this month's event...



Venue magazine are running a feature about Breakout! Not only that, but by co-incidence an old mate of mine from Buoyancy (Luke) has been asked to write it, so I'm hoping it will be pretty favourable. I had to answer a load of questions for an interview, and we submitted the following picture to go with the article...



Obviously I couldn't resist sneaking the news of my first release into the interview!