Very very excited to announce that I’ve been invited to perform a solo set to kick off James Lavelle’s Meltdown 2014.
It’ll be a solo cello looping set in the Royal Festival Hall before I join the UNKLE line-up (my long-time conspirators) in the second half.
Nice article re the other artists here.
Hope you can come. It’s going to be different. In the meantime let me share a previous Meltdown experience with Jeff Buckley that changed my life entirely…
It’s been a busy couple of weeks chez Sheppard with some new releases…
I wrote & recorded the string parts for Queens of the Stone Age album title track, Like Clockwork. This track also featured my mate James Lavelle. The album went straight in at number 1 in the charts (which was gratifying).
I’d also written for a very left field band called These New Puritans who I rate really highly. They divide critics as they’ve an uncompromising approach to music & performance. Their new album Field of Reeds came out last week. One of my heroes, Michael Van der Aa also worked on the album – great company to keep…
In the world of moving pictures I’ve been finishing composing the score to a film I can’t talk about as it’s horribly secret, but it’s involved creating a sound world involving glitchy electronica and paranoid soundscapes (no change there then..!).
I’m also featured as a soloist on the forthcoming Jason Statham film, Hummingbird, scored by my friend – the genius Dario Marianelli. It’s a violent yet sensitive film – and I’m providing some disturbed noises on electric cello for some of the more psychotic sequences. I drank a lot of Earl Grey in the studio that day…
Pathetically excited to hear the track I worked on with UNKLE – James, Aiden Lavelle and Pablo Clements being used in Top Gear for the race across Japan. It originally appeared as an advert for BMW – see below. The brief was to rework elements from Beethoven 9 into something suitable.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfE90BrM-qU&hl=en&fs=1]
The track features on our latest album End Titles Redux on the SurrenderAll label. Having trained as a classical player and composer, it’s incredible to meet musicians with such sonic awareness. ‘Sound design’ is a casually used term, but UNKLE have an ability to cross the threshold between sound and that which is tactile.
I’ve heard people say that architecture is frozen music, I’d argue that music can be melted architecture.
Here’s Bernstein conducting Beethoven 9 in probably the greatest performance of the work at the Freedom Concert in Berlin:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imv2M64t_og&hl=en&fs=1]