New Zealand Skier Documentary uses Scattering the Sun!

Scattering the Sun used for NZ Skier documentary! from Mark Roberts on YouTube.

I am so stoked about this! I got back from the tour all exhausted, but one of the nice things I did the morning after my first sleep was to open up a package Bucket Productions sent me, which included a free mag of New Zealand Skier and a bloody awesome NZ Ski DVD, which I had offered my music to for free.

The resulting documentary is totally radical, with guys and girls essentially jumping of terrifyingly dangerous-looking mountain cliffs and twisting their bodies, like nothing could ever be more natural and simple.

Anyhow, they used the entirety of Scattering The Sun Like Gunshot for the opening intro chapter (like 7 minutes + long!!), which had me grinning so wide I had to massage my face after watching the DVD for fear of cramping up.

Without anyone’s permission (please no lawsuits ya’ll!), I threw up a short clip of the opening sequence just to give all of you a feel for how well the track works with the slow-mo skiing footage. Check out the video, and if you’re into that sort of stuff, definitely grab a copy of the mag and video (New Zealand Skier and Basket Productions).

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Electronic Solo Tour: i.Ryoko at the Palmerston Library

A short clip I made of Thomas performing his i.Ryoko set at the Palmerston North Library.

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Solo Electronic Tour: And On Sunday We Rest

I’ll update properly tomorrow, but I just wanted to take a few seconds and let you know that Thomas and I are both well and happy. We just played our first three shows on our solo tour, and are having a wonderful experience, thus far. Wanganui and Wellington were just so special, it’s a bit hard to put in words, so until I make a proper attempt to do so tomorrow afternoon, I’ll just share with you a few photos of our set-up from this weekend’s shows.

Thursday, Wanganui @ The Eye Of Night:

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Pre-Tour Freakout and Live Setup

A wee video diary about the impending tour and the gear I’m using:

Pre-Tour Freakout and Live Setup from Mark Roberts on Vimeo.

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Old Kiss Kiss Bang Bang live video

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Watch this video on YouTube, Revver, MySpace, Metacafe, Google or DailyMotion.

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An excerpt of us performing “Afterthoughts” live at the Dux De Lux

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Prefer an alternative to YouTube? Watch it at myspace, metacafe, google, dailymotion, or revver.

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Darkwave = MC Squared at the Arc Cafe in Dunedin

Thank you Roger for shooting this video and sharing it with us!

Prefer to watch the clip on youtube?

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Camp A Low Hum “Solitaire” live video

Here’s a clip of us playing “Solitaire” acoustically at Camp A Low Hum 2008 last month. Thank you, Dan, for capturing it!

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More on Scattering the Sun Like Gunshot

Ok, I admit it: I have google alerts out on everything under the sun relating to the enright house. So, for better or for worse, that means I catch a reasonable percentage of online mentions - in this case of our video.

Since releasing the video to Scattering the Sun a few days ago, one thing has definately suprised me: a fair bit of the coverage (which, thus far, has been slow, but positive) has been coming not from New Zealand, not from the US, but instead from Germany.

Take for example this lovely write-up, translated from the German blog The Last Pop Song:

That New Zealand is a very beautiful country, is something we have known, at the very latest, since Lord of the Rings. That New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates, too, is known. Therefore, it’s quite likely that New Zealand ought to be harboring a lot of melancholy young people, as well. And that magnitude and eminence frequently stimulates musical sensitivity and the form of expression, is also a well-known fact since Sigur Ros, at the very latest. Ergo, it is not far fetched to assume that there must also exist some magnificent, melancholic music in New Zealand. (Man, are we logical today). And here it is: The Enright House play a wonderfully ethereal, elegiacal and electrifying Postrock that captured our romantic indie-heart in a storm. (…) The videos on the band’s website are of equal aesthetic magnitude. Absolutely recommended!

Most excitingly, a lot of this small wave of German blog coverage [i.e. Coast is Clear and Soundmag.de] was either directly brought on by the recommendation of one single person who liked our music enough to tell his friends, or by the simple snowball effect that his initial recommendations had.

See, for someone like myself, who has to do virtually everything by myself (writing music, recording, manufacture, design, website, social networking, internet promotion, organizing gigs, correspondance, finding musicians to help bring this music to life, and so on), the simplest help, the simplest gesture of support, can make my life as a musician so much more worthwhile.

It’s hard to explain, but when other human beings support something you have created, something you have invested your life in, it changes you. It makes me more humble, more joyous, and more motivated.

So, to everyone who has ever helped me and the band out: thank you. Your generous help is, and always be, humbly received and appreciated.

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New video: Scattering the sun like gunshot

• High-res download [720x400 DivX .avi @ 110mb]
• Medium-res download [320x240 DivX .avi @ 67mb]
• iPod compatiple mp4 download [320x240 mp4 @ 36mb]
• High-res DivX streaming at Stage 6 [720x400]
• Low-res streaming at YouTube, Last.FM, Google, and Revver.

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I never thought I’d see this

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Stillness, poetry and music

Mary is generally very good at living. She is highly intelligent, well-educated, and enviably successful at making sound and moral decisions in her life. She also happens to be a poet with a marvelous knack for transforming the familiar and forgotten into something odd, gentle and worth remembering:

Somewhere Between Here and There

At dusk, when tide is low, the silver water turns dull
unpolished and scratched by wind that growls
across the tips of waves, choppy as a see-saw.
The fish are lined up on the shore like soldiers,
washed up after bobbing along the froth.
Rattling, red-brown leaves shake on branches
and, shaking off inhibitions, fly away with a dry rustle,
scratching together airborn–like insect wings.
The smell of the salt off the sea is dry;
it sticks in the throat before the wind
changes directions, but leaves a scaly aftertaste.
The fish on the sand are the biggest I’ve ever seen,
swollen and half-buried beneath drifts of salt and sand.
I reached over and traced the edges of the scales,
dry instead of wet, glinting like well-worn pennies.
Their mouths were open tunnels, big enough to hold
a matchbox racecar, but lined with white teeth,
tiny as maggots, nothing inside but ink.
The eye sockets were deep and dark,
the gelatinous membranes eaten away,
empty as a playroom outgrown and abandoned
somewhere between here and there.

Songs of ours where Mary’s poetry can be heard:

An old piece of mine called One Of Many Dinner Conversations [mp3 6.3MB], and two songs off of the new album, A Maze and Amazement, called Solitaire [video on cliptip] and Remember The Stillness.

Remember The Stillness
Solitaire

I can’t rememember the precise moment when I started paying more attention to the combination of spoken word and music, but suffice it to say it’s been a few years now, and my interest in it continues to intensify. Here are three marvelous examples from the classical world:

Exerpt from Knee 5 by Philip Glass (from his opera “Einstein On The Beach”):

Philip Glass – Knee 5

Exerpt from Steve Reich’s The Cave:

Exerpt from Delta Run by Annea Lockwood:

Annea Lockwood – Delta Run

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