Stornoway

"You're spread like butter on the bed linen"

Monday July 26, 2010

The Mystery Jets’ album Serotonin may be (extremely caressful on the ears and) a gentle reminder of Ollie’s last four years, which culminated as follows outside the record store on campus:

…but his head is stuck firmly in the music. We four are enjoying a few days off refamiliarising ourselves with our instruments. It’s funny, this biz: the bizzier you get, the less time you have to enjoy that first pure hobby that set it all rolling – songwriting. Having toured on and off for many months now we’re finding our fingers hardened by the road but our minds softened by the schedules… A chance to play some scales is most welcome! Writing towards Album II will begin soon.

Great news. NME have the exclusive on our new music video: tiny.cc/mondaynightinJune

We leave you with this treat from last week’s five-song session which was filmed at the Rotunda in Oxford. There’s no telling from these pictures, but it’s a disused dollhouse museum which has been reinvented as a model green-lifestyle abode. It’s fantastic; just wait for the footage to arrive at 4ad.com, you’ll see!

Russia in colour a century ago

Tuesday August 24, 2010 Comment

A friend sent me a link to these incredible photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii a whole century ago in central Russia during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II.

Apparently Prokudin-Gorskii pioneered a method which involved taking three black and white pictures in rapid succession using filters (red, green and blue) and then, at the developing stage, he blended them together to synthesise complete colour images. As there don’t seem to be any restrictions on their publication, here are a couple of my favourites. The first is of a switch operator on the Trans-Siberian railway near Ust Katav in 1910:

The second is of hay harvesters near the Mariinskii Canal, taken the previous year:

There’s something uncanny about these faces from history appearing in full colour, in that they appear at once both familiar and foreign (not just in the geographical sense): I suppose we are accustomed to viewing human history from the early 20th century onwards through the prism of old stills or footage in black and white – so much so that it’s almost as if the world actually existed without any colour until the 1960s – and this normally serves to create a neat gulf between past and present. It’s so unusual to get a glimpse of the distant past recorded in chromatic detail that you can scarcely believe these pictures were taken so long ago!