I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Month: July 2013

Planning to start this tomorrow

Posted by on in Plants

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I’m looking forward to trying to grow some chillies. I’ve never grown anything like that before, at least not for a long time anyway, so it should be interesting to see what sort of results I get.

Perhaps I’ll even do a daily picture of them. Who knows.

A new album coming from Blancmange!

Posted by on in Music

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And a tour too! How lovely. I’m looking forward to that. Ok, it’s a remake of their very first album, but that’s ok. It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve made of it after all this time.

Well done Miselu

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

It was just great to see this project finally get to kickstarter today. It’s already achieved over a third of its funding target in just one day, and I think it’ll do really well.

And it’s great to have played a very small part in this.

New old reading

Posted by on in Books and Audiobooks

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I’ve read this before, but I decided to read it again as it’s such an interesting set of essays on music. I might even pen a few notes on the content as I go through it.

For the love of tapes

Posted by on in Listening

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There are still a few tapes out there that I’d like to own, and this was one of them. Of course the benefit of buying tapes is that hardly anyone else wants them. The downside is that more people throw them away than sell them.

Still, this is a tape I’ve been after for ages.

I finished reading ‘In the field’, and these are a few things I thought

Posted by on in Creative Process, Listening, Sounds

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I’ve found this book inspiring at times, interesting, and once or twice, frustrating. It is a series of interviews with a number of people involved in field recording. It asks them a series of questions about their practice and why they record and for the most part the responses are very well put together.

For someone who has dabbled with field recording on and off for a long time I found this inspiring and illuminating. Some of the reasons given for recording and for what makes a good recording where superb. But the book isn’t just about recording, and in fact, it is very light on any kind of technical detail, which I suppose should come as no surprise as it is subtitled ‘the art of field recording’.

Quite a number of the interviewees talked extensively about listening as well as recording. This is something that I found really interesting and it’s made me think a lot more about the sounds we (I) experience every day. It’s so easy to overlook sounds that you hear all the time and not appreciate them or explore them, and in many ways recording is a way to do just that.

So the book has given me a lot to think about, and some things to follow up on too. I’m intrigued to find out where it’ll take me next.