Update, Zivi & Amazing Concerts!

Dear readers, I need to apologise for my bad blogging schedule during the past weeks. There has been just so much happening in my life that I could not find the time to write.

But hey, here's an update!

Well, first of all, I was on holidays a few weeks, in the mountains in Switzerland, but also in Denmark. In Denmark I filmed a lot, those videos still need some editing done and it will take a bit of time until I finish that. But don't worry it'll come!

I'll also write a post with some of my favourite pictures from this trip in a couple of days.

Two weeks ago I started Zivildienst. It's for the people in our country who don't wanna do military service. I did not want to join the military, because I think it is a waste of time and because I want to do something good during the time I have to serve the country. At Zivi one can work at multiple different places, for example at an elders residence, a Kindergarten, somewhere in the mountains helping a farmer or like me, at a school. I started working at the school I went to five years ago and I must say it's such a cool job! Such nice people around me all day and it's just 5 minutes away from home! Now I am off to a Zivi camp in the mountains with a course on how to care for teens :)

Last week on Sunday I also started working as a photographer in Muri at Pflegidach, a really cool and cosy jazz club! It's a lot of fun and I can even see the concerts for free (: Yesterday I saw Nate Wood and the concert was amazing! Here are some impressions:

Electronic Music

As some of you may know, my final school project is about electronic music. I sample sounds from some area and then use them to create songs. For this, I ran around quite some time to get the recordings and now it's the time to stitch them together.

For a long time, I've used Logic X for all my music production. But it is not that great for sampling! That's why a good friend of mine gave me a little crash-course in Ableton Live, a program which is made for electronic music production. And it was totally worth it!

Now I use a combination of both programs to get the perfect result.

I need to manipulate the sounds that I've recorded a lot to get the results I want. Either I equalise them to emphasise some frequencies, I shift the pitch, cut them and use many other effects. Most of them I do on my computer because it is simple and gives you clean results.

But now I've bought a kit to build a mono-granular-sampler called the "MicroGranny". The kit was quite fun to build together, but the whole messing around with sounds is a lot more fun!

It is a tiny pocket sampler which means, you can record sounds and then change their rate, pitch, release and also the size of the grains. It splits up parts of the recorded sample and mixes it together in other ways. It makes the sample sound a lot more special and diverse.

When I bought it, I did not think that I could use it for my final project, but now I can and it is a lot of fun!

Another thing that happened last week was, that one of the biggest cranes in Europe was brought to our school to build the new sports hall. The school then asked me, if I could take some pictures with my drone:

Preparing a cool concert - Summerparty - Recording

Exams are over, but there's still a lot of things on my to-do list! One of them is a concert which will be next week on Wednesday at 7 PM at our school. It's the concert of the music-focus subject, which means there will for sure be a lot of great performances!

At the moment I am practising like wild for this event and in the meantime, I also had to record some jazz standards for my teacher so he could mark them.

Last weekend a good friend of mine had a birthday party which was really cool! We've played a lot of Viking Chess, an awesome game, had a barbeque and a great time enjoying our exam-freedom :D

Starting my maturity-project!

Time passes so quickly! Next school year, which is not that far away, only three more weeks to go, will already be the last year!

Every student, given the fact that he wants to finish this school level with a testimonial, needs to hand in a project in the midterm of the first semester of the last year. And the cool thing about it is that everyone can decide to make whatever he or she pleases! Some people do something scientific, some sort of research or experiment. One of my friends, for example, makes an underwater remote-controlled craft, which takes a lot of time and patience to make since there are a lot of things you need to consider when you're building something which needs to be waterproof, and so on..!

Someone else is making a movie, another person is composing a music piece. But personally, I'm not that interested in any of these. But I love making music! So what could I do?

One thing about music that I'm really interested in is, of course, making my own music! But I don't like writing it; it's just not my way of being creative. The thing I like is a more technical and, in my opinion, free approach to making music. I don't want any lines on sheets to limit my creativity, and in some way, I think that sheet music does this to me. My way is to record and produce. I just like to sit down at something which makes noise (can be a piano, but doesn't need to be) and just start recording the sounds it creates, editing them, experimenting with them and rearranging them in new forms that exceed the casual forms of music you listen to every day.

So I found just the right thing for me!

I call it "Klangschaften", which is my play on German words for "landscapes of sound" (don't mix that up with Soundscapes, because that's an entirely new thing!).

In my definition, a soundscape is a song made out of noises, melodies and sounds recorded just from one place, one landscape.

Maybe you'll think that it's unoriginal because I know some others have done that before, but not in this way! Most of them just worked with rhythmic patterns, recorded noises and used them to create percussion. But I also want to record melodic elements, harmonies in our daily landscapes. And I want to limit myself too, I just plan on doing these landscapes for a certain place. One place, for instance, is the place I live and grew up. There are so many cool, funky and interesting sounds all around and I just want to record them and make them into enjoyable pieces!

I'm also filming the whole thing, which is quite easy with my new mobile recording setup. I can take it everywhere with me and it actually isn't that heavy to carry around. And the nice thing about it is, that the audio is synched in a very good quality with the movie clip, so I don't have to do that afterwards!

I borrowed the Canon 5D from a friend of mine, and the Zoom I got for myself. I've put it onto a Steadicam to get nice, smooth film footage!

Thanks for reading :)

Miss Gerolds Garden

Just a couple days ago I found this event on Facebook: a Design Market at "Frau Gerolds Garten" in Zürich! Of course I would go there :D

And that's what a friend and I did today and it was totally worth it! So much crazy cool things to look at and maybe not to buy because they were all way too expensive ^^

We also went atop the Freitag Tower to check out the cool view over the city, then continued our trip to the Hiltl to get some lovely cake :)

In the late afternoon I had this urge to produce some music again, and that's literally all I did until eleven thirty in the night.. I'm sure it's another song for our upcoming album (which still needs a lot of work and time).

Today we also had a dance-performance in Baden, as advertisement for the dancefestival which is going to take place the next weekend :)

Lots of band practice!

Finally the holiday started and I had a great first day in our school's choir week! We practice Monteverdi the entire day which was great and spent a nice time in the evening at the lakeside singing songs :)

This week I had so many band practises with our new group. I was asked if we would like to perform in three weeks time and then we decided to spontaneously form a group and start practicing. I think that it's actually going to turn out great because we already have a few cool songs in our repertoire.

Yesterday evening I also had a party at my home (after four hours of band-practise!), I made pizza dough so everyone could later put the topping they desire on it. We also played Singstar and watched a cool movie together! So a real fun evening :D

Through the lens of an immigrant, Concert recording

This week was great!

On Wednesday I prepared a photography exhibition with Farhad. He's a Syrian photographer who now lives here in Switzerland for about one and a half years as an immigrant. We did a project a couple months back where we went onto the street with him, and he had to take some pictures. Later we analysed them together, and now I offered him the chance to present them at our school.

It was quite some work until we prepared it all! First, we had to get some more presenter-boards form another building, put the pictures on them nicely and help Ali make tea for the exhibition. Just on time everything was ready :D

There were a lot of people, more than I expected. At one time nearly the whole room was full!

Photo by Farhad Ala

My friends had a concert in a small cinema on Thursday, where they performed live music to a muted black & white film. It was really well done, they did a great job!

I was asked to record the whole thing, audio and video. And of course, I did! It took quite some time to set it up, with all the cameras and stuff. Now I still have to edit everything..!

Huge Christmas Celebration - Blind Cow

This week was totally amazing! Next to some last exams before the holidays me and six friends from the focussubject music went to a really cool restaurant together! It's called "BlindeKuh" which is translated to blind cow. One cool thing about this restaurant is that you are served by blind people and blind people cook the food you eat. But the amazing part is that you yourself are in an extremely dark environment. You literally don't see a thing for the whole time you eat dinner!
It's cool because your other senses, for instance tasting and hearing, are extra observant and the food tastes a lot more intense than usual. A really fun and tasty way to experience how it would be if you were not able to see, I can totally recommend it!

Every year there is a huge Christmas celebration at our school. Since it once was a monastery (quite some years in the past) there is still a very big church on the school-grounds. There we sang with the big choir, some small choirs including the teachers choir. Of course the school orchestra played as well. All together it was a lot if fun! You can see some video footage Here.

In addition to singing in the choir I also ran around with my camera all the time. Nearly every time you heard the wood creaked it was probably me on the entablature ^^
But I got some cool shots:

The Teachers-Choir

I also had another concert this week with the SiSoKo. It's the singers-songwiters concert at our school where I accompany some singers on the piano. It wasn't so much fun this time because I was really ill on Thursday and my nose was running all the time..

With my parents I went once again to a very cool winter market in Zürich. It's called Heiliger BimBam and it's very alternative and hipster. I like!
We had a lot of fun and I even met some vendors from last years market!

Back home baking!

This week I was back home from England again. Me and my mum took a plane which was obviously delayed again and came home late on Monday.
During the week I did a lot of music again, mostly alone though because most of my friends were still on holidays. I also baked some lovely cakes, one of them a Sachertorte which took quite some time to make!

Yesterday evening I met with some friends to play some board games. It was so much fun and something I didn't do in a very long time!

Jacob Collier and Karls Daring Alleyshow

Last Sunday I went to a concert again (which was a relief after having two concerts of my own on Friday and Saturday).
Jacob Collier played in Muri and it was an amazing! Collier is a young musician from London who became famous by doing some unique YouTube Videos like this one where he sang a-capella songs with split screens. And now he already collaborated with Snarky Puppy.

Picture by Musig im Pflegidach

Friday evening me and my parents went to Zürich to see "Karls Kühne Gassenschau" which is translated to Karls Daring Alleyshow. It's a theatre group which exists since 1984 and performed a lot of self made and very critical theatre pieces in Swiss German. Their new project "Sektor1" is all about the future and how trash will be managed then. They say that they've found the solution to the garbage problem by sending all the bags up into orbit. The whole earth is clean and the people who live clean get a reward by being able to go to the Sector 1 for a day. It's the most beautiful Sector of all.
But then the garbage starts falling down from the sky again and emerging from the ground and in the end they build a time machine to get pack into the past to make this never happen in the first place.
The whole scenery was just brilliant and with the live music and all the fire and explosions it was also rich of action.

Summernight-Party

I talk a lot about the good things at my school, and I think I'll never stop, because last Friday we had the annual huge summernight party in the park. It's a huge event with over 4500 tickets sold! The 2-4 grades need to do either a food-booth, one for drinks which the 4th years usually make, or a cultural booth.
Since the topic was "Swiss made" this year we decided to do a shooting range kind of like Wilhelm Tell where you had to shoot apples down from politician's heads.. It was a lot of fun!

I also played a concert with my friends from the music workshop and it was amazing! So many people came to listen and danced all the time, clapped their hands and had a lot of fun!

Music for the KSWE-News

Since last year our school has got their own YouTube channel. There they post videos every few weeks about current topics that are discussed in school and what the students ought to know.
I think that this concept is really good and shows that our school is modern and uses new ways of communication to talk to their students.

So this year the new people making the videos came up to me and asked me "hey, why don't you make the music for our videos?" and of course I agreed!
It was really fun, because I have never made an Intro-Song before and me and the video-guys think that I did a good job, but you can take a listen for yourself ;)
-> KSWE-News Jingle

Jamming and making music with my friends

This week was really cool! It was the last one of my summer holidays and I have enjoyed it a lot!
I have been making a lot of music in the last week for the new album. And we formed our own music group with which we want to play outdoors on the street sometimes :)
Another friend of mine got herself a hang-drum. It's a really cool instrument and we've tried it out yesterday which was so much fun!
I also skyped with a friend who is a musician and lives in New York. He often takes time to help me with recording things and explained to me the basics of synthesis music a couple months back.
Tomorrow I will start my next year in school and I am really looking forward to it, because now I get to choose which subjects I want to focus on and I've chosen music. So now I will have four hours more music lessons every week and choir and also a djembe lesson which I am so excited for!!

Marins Music Studio

For quite a while now me any my friend Gideon who plays the trumpet have been recording multiple songs to make our own little album! It is so much fun and every time we record we get so many new ideas.
On Saturday we started doing some live recordings and they ended up pretty nice too :)

And now it is time to edit it all together :D