After the success with Rael’s website, he has essentially been acting as my agent; having got me the Finzi gig, and shortly after that a site for his friend and professional colleague Matt Robertson. [Thanks Rael!]

Matt Robertson is a composer/engineer type, working on film and commercial music projects. He wanted a smart but creative looking CV site to act as an online business card. It needed to be simple to update and look great, but not be particularly dynamic or rich - just text and images.

It was scratch built in PHP and HTML, and the background image is a detail from a painting entitled “Orange Strip” by my immensely talented grandfather Michael McLellan.

Quick cover for the demo/promo CD of new Tooting Bizarre Euro-proggers The K!Nights Of Rad.

The excellent interstellar octopus image is by Tariq Raheem, who has kindly agreed to its use. Check his work out on DeviantArt.com.

Totally studly and macho flyer for the first Tooting Bizarre gig in Croydon, at the Scream Lounge . Vanessa’s excellent Euro-Prog band The K!Nights Of Rad (website/myspace to follow) support.

I received an email from Nicholas Dobson, author of the very fine “Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook” and founding member of the ICS.

I’m building a huge playlist of ICS music, stuff people made with the 20-Song Game, and I’ve been giggling like crazy listening to your “Breakfast Cereal” song - an excellent example of what I like to call the “Instant Observational Songwriting” sub-genre of lodge music . Something very intimately hilarious about that session you did, very classic.

“There’s all these crazy traditions that have sprung up within the psychotic strictures of the 20-Song Game. Like “micro-filler”, which is the maniacal little songs people create to pad out their track list for the way, or the Self Reflexive Song, where the person sings about them self writing songs. Instant Observational Songwriting is like an externalized version of the latter, for those of us that can sing and play an instrument at the same time. I’ve heard lots of examples of IOS, and of course have joyfully produced lots of it myself, but I was having a hard time finding THE godlike example of it. I used one of my songs as an example of micro-filler, and so I definitely needed to find someone else’s song for IOS, so that I wasn’t hogging the glory by having all the educational examples be MY stuff. Hurray!

What could I do but accept? An honour indeed. Thanks to the ICS for some great times and some hilarious music.

:)

Recently completed another Drupal site, this time for London-based string quartet; the Finzi Quartet.

The requirement was for a neat public site, stylish but classy, which captured something of the girls’ personalities and was accessible to a slightly older visitor, in line with the audience for their music.

I chose to use Drupal as they required a quite full featured website which they could keep up to date themselves.

I had a lot of trouble with the Image Gallery module, (which I have to say I’m not a big fan of), and ended up (re)building the photo galleries from scratch using CCK file fields, Views and CSS.

Nice. So I downloaded the new Firefox and there’s this persona thing. Easy to make, I thought. I was right. Here’s three:

Weirdly continuing the nautical theme from last year’s flyers, Tooting Bizarre is now in it’s third year (I think) at the The Miller.

Vanessa and I couldn’t decide on a single shop to put a wedding list in, so I decided to make this here Wedding website. It is a list of all the nice things that we imagine that people will want to to get us! In time, we will add maps and other wedding details, but for now it is a list linking to stuff on other random shops and websites. Once people have claimed a gift, they should put their name against it by editing the item and putting your name in the “Bought By…” field. I hope people can work it out!