Pale White Dot...?

I can see light at the end of the tunnel, the end is near approaching... yep, that's right we've nearly finished the Blind Voyeurs' debut album. We've got a small list of a few bits here and there on each track that need tidying up. We've been clipping our lovies and sweeping the dust under the carpet for so long now that the album has completely changed direction from original vision. But all for the better me thinks - it actually 'feels' like a complete body of work.

In the last 14 or so months some of our favourite songs/tunes have been removed and new ones have surfaced that have raised the bar. We've made some controversial decisions and will be making MORE controversial decisions in the next couple of months. We've had band members come and go and then come back again (and then go...) We've also got a new top secret weapon that can only be unveiled in 2009.

In the next 2 to 3 weeks things should all be being finalised (I'm not saying too much yet cos you never know what might happen) then it's time to look at artwork and inlay cards etc.

People keep asking us 'how long does it take to make an album???' Well, the answer to that is - as long as it has to!

Y'see the thing is, we all have full-time jobs and we have social and family lives to lead. And then there's holidays and sicknesses etc. If we were a fulltime band working 9 to 5 on nothing but music, you could compress all the time we've spent on this album quite easily into less than 6 weeks. Don't forget that we're doing everything ourselves AND learning everything from scratch.

We've also switched our recording software platform 3 times since we started and new hardware equipment has been purchased halfway through from mixing desks to bass amps to microphones! Add to that the fact that we all really care about this project - it's a complete labour of love - so we're never using the "That'll do" mindset.

And then there are the gigs. We found out at the end of last year that with a project this big we can't concentrate on recording and rehearse for 2 or 3 gigs a month at the same time. So in 2008 we decided to tone it down a bit... until eventually not gigging at all!! It was tough turning down gig offers - and I still hate doing it - but we had to try and prioritise. Gig or record. One or the other. If we attempted to do both, each would suffer. We would have ended up with a string of shit gigs followed with a dessert of a half-arsed album. That would've pissed everyone off!

Anyway, I don't want to build it up - in fact I dunno why I rambled as much as I did. It all just came blurbing out! I do that sometimes. Anyway... enough for now.

The Archive

Woo! Double post today!! I've just seen this video and I have to share it with whoever occasionally glances at this corner of the internets.


The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

Paul Mawhinney was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the years he has amassed what has become the world's largest record collection. Due to health issues and a struggling record industry Paul is being forced to sell his collection.

This is the story of a man and his records. I hope you enjoy it.

Home Alone

So Lisa's buggered off to Wales for 4 nights. Which leaves just me and the cat left to fend for ourselves!! She went yesterday and I already miss Lisa loads - just don't know what to do with myself. But that being said I can always find things to distract myself - I've got loads of little tweaks to do with the BV album mixing, I'm learning how to use Final Cut properly (God it's sooo fuckin in-depth and professional! FACTOID: The Coen Brothers used Final Cut to edit and colourize one of my favourite films - No Country For Old Men)



I've also got The Force Unleashed to play - which is totally frickin awesome! Absolutely love the storyline in this. If you're a Star Wars fan (which I clearly am) then you have to check this out because the story is mindblowing!



Last night I finished off watching series 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Woah, what a finale?!?!?! Battlestar is, IMHO, probably one of the the best sci-fi shows in the history of all TV ever - it's sooooo realistic and dark and the characters are deep and ... and... I could go on but I won't!

Before Lisa left we popped into ASDA to grab a few things and just as you walk in they had boxes and boxes of Carlsberg and Kronenberg (18 bottles) for a fiver each!! So we grabbed a box of each - there were loads of freshers there buying them by the trolley load! So, all in all, I've got loads to keep me occupied, 36 bottles of beer in the fridge and a chippy/chinese/indian take-aways just round the corner .... I think I'll survive!! :)

Why Should Rock Stars Expect To Be Rich?

The future record industry simply won't be able to maintain the kind of salaries that pop stars of the last century were used to.

read more | digg story

stevebeck.co.uk

Yep, that's right. I've registered my own domain. It's www.stevebeck.co.uk. It only redirects to this blog at the moment but that's basically what I wanted it for. It was only 99p for the first year and then £2.99 for every year after that. I've no need to pay for hosting because my blog is already hosted by Blogger. So update your bookmarks if you have em cos stevebeck.co.uk is my new front door. Yay!

Dead Set on E4

Just head about this new show called Dead Set coming to E4. It's a horror spin-off version of Big Brother Unlike the parent show, this will be a straight dramatic horror featuring the shows presenters, but with actors playing the house mates. The plot involves a zombie outbreak which strands the housemates inside the Big Brother house. Although the house is one of the only places left were people can shelter from the zombie attack, the infection soon seeps in and what follows is an unimaginable terror.

Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - Episode 1

Jamming in the studio Saturday 13th Sept 08



The BV boys have a new studio to play in. Interestingly it's situated underneath a pole dancing studio in Southbourne! This is the first in hopefully many insights into what actually goes on in there. This week we decided to take a break from recording and decided to have a jam - to see if we come up with anything interesting.




Blind Voyeurs: In The Studio - episode 1 from Steve Beck on Vimeo.



Blind Voyeurs on Myspace

Polish Film Posters

I've just stumbled upon this incredible collection of Polish Film Posters. They are so different from the American/English/Rest-of-the-world's posters it's unbeleivable. I don't know much about why they're like this. I can only assume that there was some weird copyright laws involved and so they had to draft in artists to create new designs. Some of them are so far removed from the actual film content. It's completely blown my mind. I will say that some of them are shit by todays professionally photoshopped examples but you have to understand that these were probably made on a zero budget, most in the 70's or 80's, they had to completely design their own font (not download from the internet it like you would today) and work with awkward and messy screen printing processes.




Apocolypse Now



STAR WARS - The Empire Strikes Back



Alien

Click me to see the rest...

JB records guitar

JB records guitar, originally uploaded by SteveBeck.

We had our first band practice at the new rehearsal studios on Sunday. Sound was good - nice and punchy. We re-recorded the guitars for The Christening because it was too muddy. We decided to record them totally clean. Also added a few incidental drum and percussion sounds here and there in the parts that will adjoin Chistening with Pale Blue Dot. Other recorded parts were lo-fi drums for Keep It On The Road.

The practice room is situated in the basement of a Pole-Dancing dance studio. It was empty - they have classes on Thursday. There was an old tuneless upright piano in there which was a bit of fun to tinker on. Thinking about using it for something in the album. Could be pretty haunting

Psycho Cat in a box!

Psycho Cat in a box!, originally uploaded by SteveBeck.

Tilly loved this shoe-box! She still thinks she a kitten and tries to sleep in it.

The Watchmen

I've just started reading this last night....



I'm only about 30 pages in but already I'm hooked. I'm reading it in preparation for the movie. Here's the trailer...



Boner!

Zizzi in Bournemouth

Just a quick post to say that I thoroughly recommend Zizzi restaurant in Bournemouth. It's a pizza/pasta type restauant and it where Yellow River used to be on Richmond Hill. Great decor, amazing food, really nice staff and an open kitchen creates a really friendly atmosphere. Check it

End of the month... busy busy busy!!

OK, so it turned out that I'm no longer bored of the internet - just that sometimes it can be a chore going to all my different haunts and checking messages, updates and friends requests. And I know I haven't blogged in a while. Finding time is hard. I could do micro posts, I s'pose, but I kinda do that on facebook: 'Steve is ... doing his chores', 'Steve is ... out with his mates' etc etc.

One thing I thought I was going to blog about was Endorse It In Dorest 2008. It was my first time at this local festival and had planned to edit together a movie. But it turned out that it was taking me forever to do because I'm finding iMovie HD restricing. It's the movie editor that came with my macbook. It's pretty powerful but it's a sequential editor, not a multitrack editor which makes it more difficult to get timings right. It's fine for just stringing stuff together though - I just prefered Sony Vegas. Anyway, all the clips are on Flickr. Check out the slideshow below...



I had a great time at this festival. Although, Saturday had heavy rain throughout the WHOLE day. So me and Lisa decided to come home for that day and go back on the Sunday. It was a wise move!

James Burtn also announced that he'd finally popped the question to Emma. Yep, that's right, they're getting married. So a big congrats to them - such a great couple. They were made for eachother (and Emma has the patients of a saint - not many people would put up with James's ways!) We were in Endorse It when we heard the news via text... they were in France... so we had a drink in their honour.

When they got back we had a massive party at Kai's house. I don't remember much about it thanks to Marianna's homemade Casasha. But I know it was a good one.

Me and Lisa dug deep and scraped together some pennies to buy a shiny new 24" iMac. We had to for several reasons. Mainly because of Lisa's Degree (at least that was my main excuse). My old PC was really started to creak and within the last 2 weeks of it's life it managed to catch a particularly nasty virus. I managed to contain and remove the virus but not before it messed up my OS. I couldn't switch the thing off. Everytime it shut down it would restart itself. And I couldn't browse the internets either. It would load up google but then I couldn't go to any other page! Oh and dodgy pop-ups would appear even when I didn't have a browser open. I ran a virus checker on full deep scan and it managed to detect 27 viruses!! I couldn't trust my machine anymore. I could reformat it but then I'd lose everything I had on it. I'd had it for a long time so it was time for a new piece of hardware. Enter then new 24" iMac with 4GB Ram and 1TB Hard Drive.

After it arrived our bloody washing machine decided to die on us!! Talk about timing! Luckily I'd paid off my credit card some months back and hadn't touched it since so the new washing machine went on the card. So now I'm pretty skint!

Bored of the internet?!?

I dunno, maybe I am. I've not logged onto here for an update for a long time. I hardly use Facebook to talk to people. I occassionally log onto MySpace to check messages but ignore friend requests (There's 3 pages on my own profile and about 12 pages on Blind Voyeurs' profile) I've not uploaded to my flickr. I've posted once or twice on Solid Air messageboard and Never go to b3ta anymore (hmmm I must check that out)

These days I've mainly been on youtube. I've only posted 1 video about 3 weeks ago but I regularly log on to watch vids - current favourites being 21stCenturyCat (for a bit of vlogging and comedy) and SFLogicNinja (for really useful tutorials for Logic 8)

I'm often checking out news on digg.com - occassionaly commenting. But that's about it. I'm kinda bored of participating in conversations. I just use it to mainly read or watch stuff. I think it's just got to a stage where I've got so many profiles on so many different sites that it just becomes a chore to go to them all everyday. The profiles I've talked about here are just a few. There are a load that are more neglected than these.

Don't worry. I'm sure I'll snap out of it!

GTA has got me and not letting go!

Sorry about the lack of posts. GTA IV is to blame mostly! Whenever I got a spare moment I'm on that thing plugging away at those missions, sniping people, stealing cars, killing prostitues etc.

That being said, I HAVE been having a life....



I went to see Iron Man with Lisa (after a really nice meal in Wagamamas). 2 words about the film ... 'fucking incredible'! Robert Downey Jr is amazing as Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Jeff Bridges is unbelieveably brilliant! The storyline is totally believable and solid, the acting is superb, the sprinkling of comedy had me laughing out loud, the effects were seamless and it had the best cameo of Stan Lee ever! It will have to be owned on Blu-Ray when it comes out.

I've been to 60 Million Postcards this week twice - once to see Maz perform her RubyMusic stuff live and give her a bit of support, and the second time was to go to the 'It Came From Japan' evening (I write about that on my Bi-Polar Bears blog)

I've been to see my dad during the bank holiday weekend

I watched the Snooker final.

...and the footbal final with Chealsea V Man U (that's probably my only football entry on this blog!)

Been getting back into Heroes


I received my NIN Ghosts Deluxe Edition in the post this week. Chuffed!

We played a gig at 60 Million Postcards for Solid Air - everything went really smoothly... apart from the very end where the last track fell apart because of technical difficulties (although, nobody in the audience actually noticed - they all thought it was part of the song!)

Oh and I've shaved my head!

H2-Woah!

I've just been forwarded an email about a news article on BBC News website from Lisa. It's entitles Bournemouth homes get fast fibre.

Bournemouth has been picked as the first UK town to get super-fast fibre via the sewers.

It is part of a plan from fibre firm H20 to extend its underground sewer networks from businesses to consumers.

Work will begin on the network within the next six months and more towns will be announced in coming months.

It will bring broadband of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second) to 88,000 homes in the Dorset town and is the largest scheme of its kind in the UK.

More...

Grand Theft Auto IV

Not much to say here - you know what it's all about, you know you have to own it. I've had it since Friday and I just have to say it's way better than I could ever have hoped. Fantastic!

New music video for Blind Voyeurs

So, I figured it'd be good to submit something to Vimeo as I love that site and I thought why shouldn't I showcase some of my material!? This video is a short snippet of some of my live visuals for Blind Voyeurs gigs put to some music. The tune is called Chemical Burns.

New tune + New Visuals = New Music Video.



Blind Voyeurs - Chemical Burns (DEMO v1.02) from Steve Beck on Vimeo.

It's also on YouTube. If you've got a profile on there and want to fave it, comment it, rate it. Feel free

Digg: Free New Nine Inch Nails Song, "Discipline"

Found on Digg.com (for those interested)...

Trent Reznor is an amazing man, just put your email address in to get the download link and check your email to download Discipline, the new single

read more | digg story

UPDATE: I just downloaded it, listened to it, didn't really care for it much. It was NIN by numbers if you ask me. But you might like it. And as it's a free download that's also DRM free that's a bonus. It's better to download it for free and then decide whether you like it or not than to go buy it on CD in HMV, take it home, listen to it and THEN decide you don't like it.

Eye eye

I can't quite remember the last thing I was dreaming about this morning but I know that I was about to apologise to someone in my dream before my alarm went off and woke me up. That annoyed me. So I hit snooze, went back into slumber land for 5 minutes so I could apologise to this guy and finish off my dream. I have such a guilty conscience that I even have to make ammends with imaginary people!! What's that all about?!?

Anyway, then I finally woke up properly my right eye was all blurry. I must've been sleeping on it. It's happened before and it normally corrects itself. But now it's nearly 10:00am and I still can't see out of my right eye properly! It's freaking me out a bit!!!!

(Lisa's just texted me saying that she'll have to get me an eye patch!!! Yaaarrrr Jim lad!!!)