Hard to believe it’s almost the end of the year already – Time’s taken on a whole new way of rolling these days eh. I’m still very much playing catch-up.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of 2021 out in the wilds. After a particularly brutal year emotionally, I’d noticed I’d lost my marbles somewhat and decided it was necessary to check in with mother nature for a while – to write, sing at trees and more importantly, listen to them sing back.
A few weeks ago, I took off into rural Herefordshire & the Welsh Borders where I met a magic pony who spoke to me from both ends, that deserves a whole blog post of its own though…
During the process of this foray I got pretty obsessed with field recording. Armed with a portable recorder, I found it enormously liberating to be able to get outside, away from the computer screen and write/record anywhere, free from all my usual production gubbins & minutae.
Turns out to do this effectively, it’s often necessary to put little grey furry hats on your microphones to deal with the wind noise. I learned these are also known as “Dead cats” in the clearly quite morbid world of location recording .
One day, on a trip to a small Welsh town, I was delighted to find a matching grey furry hat & jacket for myself in a charity shop – clearly a sign from the universe – so with that, I got down to work.
A few weeks later, I was eventually tracked down by one of my favourite humans – the ever brilliant Emma, who was able to capture these Attenborough-like shots of an unhinged man in his element, from a safe distance. We then filmed a bunch of other stuff that I’m looking forward to sharing soon.