Meet Red Benny

SUPERBEAT Live 22nd June

Got some footage this time, whoop! This is from the second half of the set. I’m using the dance mat on stage to control the beat as well as kieron and kraz.

Running For Miles

Here’s a new tune we’ve recorded. Just finished it last week. I’m working on a pretty cool motion sensor for the next Milk Bar gig so keep tuned for dates…

 

Milk Bar Gig 4/5/13

We had our first Superbeat gig at the Milk Bar a couple of weeks ago. I’m really happy with how it went so we’re gonna do another pretty soon. I didnt manage to get any decent recordings myself but my sister Kelly took a short film on her phone and uploaded it onto youtube…

[note. it turns the right way up in a second]

A few posts back I mentioned that I’d been looking for some controllers to use for the audience to get involved and jam with us. I settled on the idea of using a dance mat and game controller. So I bought some that have usb connections and hooked them up to my computer, using all sorts of hokus pokus, and they worked really well. I’m thinking we’re gonna keep things pretty fluid by introducing extra or different kinds of controllers each gig (I’m working on making a multi-touch surface at the moment) but for now the dance mat is definitely gonna be a fixture.

We’re working on a maybe five track EP currently so I’ll be posting more info on that up in the next couple of months or so, other wise look out for the next Milk Bar gig!

x

Check This

Hi, sorry I’ve been away for a while, been working my arse off at the moment to fund the upcoming pop-up gig. I’ll post some more up about that soon. For the mean time here’s another track from my early producing days in my bedroom-shed in Hatfield. My friend from college introduced me to Dre and the Chronic. I didn’t really get the G-Funk thing till a bit later on but I still went through the album to see what I could pilfer from it anyway. Got a sample of Dre going “check this out muthafucka” from A Nigga Witta Gun (“what? you can’t talk witta gun in yo mouth?”).

We played this tune at a house party in my flat in Totnes in about 2007 or something, it went down pretty well. Our flat was a bit of a shit-hole so we used to use it for parties. I turned up to one once that had half of the town waiting outside. I got upstairs and it was so rammed that these two miscreants were shagging up against the radiator and no-one had noticed. My friend pointed them out to me and we all turned and laughed at them while they pulled up their kaks and ran out the flat. After that things went pretty smooth till my idiot house-mate started a fight with the hoover. He’d do shit like that when he was wasted cos I think he thought it challenged people, but generally he just looked a bit of a psycho. We used to joke that he kept his girlfriend gagged in the wardrobe.

 

 

The Dance Commander

Had a small test of the MIDI-Moov this week, for the Touch It gig, and it works really well! We’re thinking that the controller gets strapped to someone so they can dance to effect the music.

My friend Jason King is going to help us with the lighting by working on a midi program so they lights change with the person moving also. This should give more of a visual indicator for whoever’s strapped in, so they can see when they’re changing something.

Here’s a small video of Jason testing the MIDI-Moov. Whenever he moves around there’s a filter over the music that moves with him.

The Bridge – Squatting in Rotterdam

My sister Kelly was squatting in Rotterdam a few years ago. I went to visit her with this music project I wanted to make, inspired by the city, that would be based on making music from pictures of it’s buildings and places.

She had it pretty cushdy over there at the time. Squatting was pretty exceptable in Holland and it was legal as well so, if you were lucky, you could set yourself up with a pretty decent home and not have to leave for a while. Kelly had two! Never one to do things in half measures, she was making video work and her boyfriend at the time was a musician so they used one to live in and the other as a studio space. Kelly’s boyfriend was quite nice, but a bit mad. He thought he was mix between Sid Vicious and Clint Eastwood. Never left the house without his wallet, his speed and his razor (which he kept in his cowboy boots). He got caught speeding once, drunk with half a gram of coke, a gram of speed and a eighth of weed; he had his knife in in his boot and about four wasted friends crammed into the back of his van. The policeman couldn’t believe his eyes, he burst out laughing and let them go! He was stunned by the audacity of it and said there would have been too much paperwork anyway.

I spent a month there, got a bike and cycled around the city taking pictures of the architecture – which is pretty stunning, Rotterdam is like an architects playground – as well as the industrial estate, which stretches around 40 miles long. The idea was to contrast two very different visual elements and then put that into music. I chose to focus on the Erasmus Bridge, which connects north and south Rotterdam, and made each different song based on a picture from a different view of the bridge.

The music I came out with there was quite experimental, and it was the first time I’d began to use real recordings rather than samples and virtual instruments. This led on to forming Tumbling Squares.

Electric Bill

So my new project Touch It is coming up. I’ve been rehearsing with Kraz, from Tumbling Squares and Kieron, from The Five Sides. It’s going really well so far. I’m gonna have a couple of rough recordings done to post in the next week or so.

Was thinking about Tumbling Squares a little bit and thought it’s a shame that our old saxophonist Electric Bill can’t get involved. He was a funny bloke. I met him in a temp office job, in 2007, and he told me out of the blue he plays saxophone. He also told me once that he broke a guys ribs with an iron bar! I couldn’t believe it, he was actually a really nice, gentle kind of guy. Bill came from one of those posh boys boarding schools you always hear are notorious for adolescent buggery. He said the boys used to regularly have gang fights between the different ‘houses’ and someone getting a serious injury was pretty standard.

Anyway, Bill was a pretty shite saxophonist – he never practised and was always hitting dud notes – but he was wicked to play live with. He had this mad energy and he’d always be moving and dancing and grinning. The crowd loved him.

He went and did one of those TEFL jobs in Japan and stayed in east asia. He loves it now, think he’s living in Singapore.

We had a Tumbling Squares tune dedicated to him…

 

 

Sean Warman & The Five Sides

During around 2006 I got really into King Tubby for the way that he would make dub productions. Back in the 60s and 70s he would take recordings, which bands had already made in his studio, and re-record them as he played around, turning the instruments up and down and adding effects over the top. Often he would leave just the bass and the drums playing while everything else dipped in and out. Dub was born, as a genre it wasn’t long lived, but more importantly with dub King Tubby had preceded remixing.

Remixing a band as they played appealed to me so I decided to make this performance, it’s also a sort of homage to King Tubby, who in my opinion is a massively underrated influence on electronic music.

We did a mixture of covers and original material. Only the covers were rehearsed so for the rest I would play my own pre-programmed drum loops to the band who would then jam along with them. Surprisingly the jams worked better than the covers.

The band were made up from friends from Dartington, who are now all members of different bands mainly being Yes Sir Boss and Ray.

Vocals: Kieron Allan, writer for Sky At Night mag. Kieron will be playing with me on my up coming project Touch It.

Guitar: Matt Sellors, lead vocals and rhythm guitar for Yes Sir Boss

Bass: Leon Boyden, bassist for Ray

Sax: Jehan Abdel-Malak, saxophonist for Yes Sir Boss (who will possibly be playing on Touch It also)

Percussion: Dan Truent, drummer for Ray

Never See Through

Tumbling Squares is the band I formed while I was last in Bristol. This is around 2007 to 2009. We made RaveYard music, some horror inspired punk dance, with Andrew Crother (aka Craz/The Twang Man) on guitar and Billy Burris (aka Electric Bill) on saxamaphone.

I broke them up like an idiot in 2009 and decided to make some spoken word William S Burroughs inspired dance rants – a couple of which were pretty good actually.

Now I’m back in Bristol me and Craz are working together on a new project called Touch It, which I’ll tell you more about later on.

Here’s a tune called Never See Through that Tumbling Squares wrote in 2008.