skydiva
About skydiva
Posts by :
out of season
Some new DEEP SKY DIVERS music – well almost…
Check out the band OUT OF SEASON – Jon’s collaboration with his son Liam Short. Featuring new music alongside cover versions of tunes by DEEP SKY DIVERS, SOFT MACHINE and 2ND VISION. Jon plays bass and keyboards, Liam on drums and guitars.
Here’s a link to the OUT OF SEASON Soundcloud page.
raging calm
All music has a different meaning or resonance to everyone who listens. And it’s the listener who decides.
To me, the listener, RAGING CALM has always been the contrasting moods of two beaches 10 miles apart. Freshwater East and Freshwater West. East is a tranquil place of dunes and rock pools facing back towards the Bristol Channel and the rest of Britain. A shelter from the storm. West is wild and exposed facing up to everything the Atlantic Ocean can throw at it and generally throwing it all back. It’s a famous place – a film star! It’s an unruly attention seeker, unlike its benign and reclusive namesake to the east.
I spend more time east than west.
This photograph was taken at Freshwater West in february 2011. It had been a stormy month and the foamy sands were littered with all kinds of flotsam and jetsam. It was the seahorse that stood out to me. How did it get there? How did a child’s toy become lost at sea only to be found washed up on this wild shoreline? This is exactly how I found it. Charging westwards back towards the surf.
So wrong it’s right. I wonder where it is now.
the geometer of dreams
In the mid-noughties I was fortunate to have the opportunity of working with the eminent US musician/composer Michael Allison – aka Darshan Ambient. Like myself, Michael is a rock & roll bass player turned ambient/electronic recording artist and family man. We had a lot in common.
I got in touch with Michael after falling in love with his 2004 release “Autumn’s Apple”. We did a bit of transatlantic collaboration, sending music files back and forth across the pond. And I’m proud to say that 2 of these tracks ended up being released on Darshan Ambient’s “From Pale Hands to Weary Skies” CD in 2008.
Here is one of the tracks – “The Geometer Of Dreams”…
deep sky meditation
TimElapses: Deep Moonlight from green_knight on Vimeo.
This is a cool timelapse video posted in 2010. Moonrise at Pompano Beach and other time lapse images of Luna. Nice work.
The music featured is “deep sky meditation” which was our big mp3.com hit in 2000 and is available on our CD “the new fast lane”.
music for a rainy day
So what do you on a rainy day in Suffolk?
We were there for a few days in april 2014 staying in a barn near Blythburgh. It was sort of a working holiday – eldest son working on his dissertation and middle son revising for GCSE’s. I was hoping to chill out a bit but ended up working lots thanks to a mysterious hacker who gained access to my web server!
The music was provided by Liam who, although pretty conscientious with his revision, had brought his guitar along. The song I will always associate with this photo is “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake. Liam did a great job of teaching himself how to play and sing it. Odd tuning. I asked Liam what it was and he said “I dunno – Nick Drake tuning.” He needs to brush up on his theory and stuff.
The photo was taken in the morning. The rain eased a bit later on so we took our youngest son to Framlingham Castle – the older 2 electing to stay behind and work. Not daft. My boys know I’m a sucker for charity shops and any visit to an English town usually results in me dragging them in and out of PDSA, Red Cross, Oxfam etc… What we didn’t realise is that Framlingham is the hometown of Ed Sheeran and it turned out that Ed’s mum had donated a load of his clothes to the local charity shops a few weeks before. So we returned back to our barn with genuine Ed Sheeran t-shirts for Liam.
He was, and still is, made up!
part of the landscape
Part of the solution? Part of the problem? Or part of the landscape?
We visited Amsterdam recently and found these “love locks” on a bridge near Zuiderkerk. If I’m honest, I took the photo without my glasses on. I tried to focus on the locks and only realised how good the photo had come out when I got back to the hotel later. I love the detail on the locks – the engravings and the raindrops.
I hate how mankind is systematically trashing our planet. But, conversely, I find small acts of “vandalism” like this really attractive and intriguing. I’m not sure why – I just do. I think it’s something to do with viewing art as being man’s interaction with the landscape – how he affects his surroundings. Or indeed vice-versa. How the landscape affects and changes him. I suppose this has been going on for centuries and only now is it starting to get out of hand.
The locals in Amsterdam seem pretty unhappy about these ‘love locks”, the problems they pose, cost of removal etc… Which is fair do’s. But their colours and their reasons to be there brightened a grey and rainy day for us.