So for this one – I’m working on a track with a friend from Townsville “Luc Reid”/Le Baron – his music is so freaking sweet! I love writing and singing on his tracks. He’s been sending me demos for a few months, then I write lyrics/melodies and send them back for editing. It’s a really cool arrangement because it gets me out of my ambient/folky comfort zone and into the mind of dance and disco.
This is literally the first take – probably everything will have changed by the time the end track is released. Luc wants to do a bit to my vocal line and add more instruments in. I listen back and feel like it’s a bit pitchy – but I know that’ll all be edited in the final mix. So for now it’s just a super live demo.

For the rest of these their descriptions are on youtube down the bottom. Comment & share with your friends if you’d like :-)

Apart from that I’ve started watching “Game of Thrones” & getting stuck into assessment (The next few weeks at uni are crazy!)

Also – a trip down memory lane.

When i was about 6 or 7 i remember i got to have the Video player & TV in my room on holidays. We only ever rented a TV on holidays – the rest of my childhood up until about age 12/13, we never had a TV in the house.

There’s one night I remember where my parents went to sleep before my movie was finished & I felt so grown up. I was wearing a pink fluffy night gown and slippers and a cup of chamomile tea on my bed stand. My bed was quilted in an array of pink and I had one of those four-poster mosquito nets above my bed that mum had got from an opshop. It had a few tears in it from previous owners – so to fix it my mother sewed pink hearts all over them.
I finished my movie and went and turned it off in the dark house, with just my dim touch-lamp glowing next to my princess bed. I took off my slippers and curled up in bed feeling so sophisticated. It’s funny now, that I could spend all night watching a series, or movies or walking around Melbourne with friends without thinking of how great it is to independently go about my days. I feel like I will never truly feel as grateful of being free and independent as I did when i was in a sea of pink, watching a video in a quiet house. Although when i was 6/7 watching princess movies where they trekked into the woods hunting goblins – all I dreamed of was growing up and being 16; having adventures of my own and getting to explore the world.

That movie was “The princess and the goblin”
I still get the ‘Fighting goblin song’ stuck in my head sometimes and ramble to friends about it – to jog their memories on whether they remember it. “You know, there was a goblin, heaps of goblins! and a princess with red hair called irene? I think she had a cat called rhubarb, or turnip or something”
Always get blank stares…

Google answered my prayers: The whole video is up on youtube! :-) I’m going to sample the princess’s voice and use it in a rhythm piece for this week. Should be real spooky and crazy with a little princess yelling “turrrnip, don’t run into the woods!!” somewhere in it.

The song lyrics are so beautiful. No wonder I still get it stuck in my head.

A Spark Inside Us

There’s a spark inside us
That we can all ignite
And all that’s dark inside us
Will flicker into light

All that’s strong inside us
That tells us wrong from right
Becomes a song inside us
To chase away the night

The song sounds a little funny on youtube though:

x Elle

ps. Thanks for all the feedback on the youtubes. So many lovely emails & messages. I’m glad you’re liking my new stuff and the side projects i’m working on.

The feedback from my group presentation was that I should take the piano track right down so that it was either muted.. or barely heard, so instead of it being a piano/voice track – it would have more of a focus on layering and the timbre of the vocals. So basically to replace all the piano with voices: acapella “Oos”.
To me that sounded like a fantastic idea & I went home and started recording…
Turns out if you’re not spot on for every note… it sounds terrible! Which was a little disheartening. But! After a lot of tedious days of “Oooing” (My house mates must think I’m crazy/repetitively stuck, and in need of some serious musical inspiration from all the “ooing” coming out of my room) the track is done!

I’ve made the session file all pretty and colourful

I think it’s the most tracks I personally have worked with. Normally Mitch works on the sessions and I sing & mess around, and he makes it sound nice from the production side of things. But i’ve been trying to get it all done solo; showing him the tracks at the end.
So yeah, a lot of Ooing this weekend. I’ve been messing around with the “Vocal transformer” button too… sounding like a man singing “Oooo” is pretty fun. Or maybe I’ve just been doing the same thing over and over, and that’s the only joy that’s shining through. It’s also fun to turn your voice into a chipmunk, or to put delay on it so you sound like a robot.

I’m thinking of releasing some singles from the EP so that you guys can share it around and give some feedback.
I mentioned on FB last week – at 2,000 fans, this EP will be up online! So share my page around if you’re keen to hear my ooing and la laing. I’m really excited to get some more music up online for you to hear.
Share my page here: Elle Graham’s Facebook Music Page

It’s been so nice, in the last few weeks I’ve received some great feedback on Woods (& Whisper! although that release feels like forever ago)
There are kindergarden teachers that put my tunes on in the background at Nap-time, or stories from mothers saying how they used to listen to my music when they were pregnant & now their babies recognise the music – their eyes light up when their favourite song comes on! Too cute.
There have also been an array of new fans from the USA, Russia, The UK & all parts of Australia. Friends are spreading the music around universities & putting my tracks to short films… I’m really, just constantly overwhelmed by the support towards this small project of mine. As long as there are baby’s sleeping to “Sway” or people listening to Woods in their cars on the way home from work.. or brides wanting to walk down the isle to a love song I wrote back in grade 11.. I’ll always keep creating.

This music is released for you & I’m so glad you appreciate it and keep spreading it around to all parts of the world.

Peace,
& so many thankyous.
Elle x

I’ve been writing a lot in the last two weeks – I think my mind is a little more clear, and everything suddenly all clicked together; working the recording of the EP in with my University course – getting all the prep for exams done now so that I’m not freaking out last min (A new bold plus in the “time-management’ category)

I’ve recorded a few tracks for the EP already.
There are going to be two or three tracks dedicated to Alba, Nirrimi & Matt in the Blue Mountains. Their little family has inspired me a lot through Nirrimi’s lovely blog.
I sent the raw demo of “Alba’s Lullaby” to Nirrimi yesterday & she said they all adored it and couldn’t wait to use it as the soundtrack to some footage. We recorded it a few days ago. My friend Liam from uni is magical! I showed him my shocking version of me playing this song – getting all caught up in finger picking and mumbling ideas in my rambly way – and out of that he sat on a stool in my room and recorded it all in one take. So we made home-made pizza from scratch to celebrate. (I even managed to cut it so that it frisbied on to the floor; much like bread – pizza also falls on the ingredient-side-up = fun fact)
It’s awesome that he’s also a drummer; so having the metronome in the background seemed pretty easy for him. In comparison to me doing heaps of takes trying to match up to that irritating click pulsing through my headphones. Making up swearwords and calling it silly names. Me and the metronome are barely ever good pals.

After talking to Nirrimi we’ve set a week aside – I’m going up there around late July on my way up to Byron Bay. Doing a few photo shoots, and hopefully a film clip for the single off the EP (which is yet to be decided!) Nirrimi is so lovely; “i’ll cook you lots of yummy food and we can sit in front of the fireplace with big mugs of hot cacao. we can introduce you to the mountains and all the inspiration it brings.” I can’t wait.

Soo, i’m aiming to complete the EP before playing at Palm Creek Folk Festival which is from the 8th – 11th of June back home in North Queensland. I have a few little guitar tunes that I’m really keen to play at the festival, but am not sure if my guitar skills will be good enough for the stage.. just yet. So if anyone knows of someone who will be home around that time that is a magician on the guitar… let me know! They can even be a magician’s apprentice, or even just a guitar elf, or a modest fairy. As long as they can play the guitar better than me (An easy thing to do..) they are welcome to join Luce & I on stage.

Jeeze, This EP is just going to be one of many! I have so many ideas for tracks, if only it were easier and i could just record every day… I still have plans for completing the instrumental soundtrack EP & the continual 20 minute EP which is one single song over either the same bass note, or some kind of continual sample. But I think for now i’ll just keep on working on these 5-track folky ambient pop releases, as they’re a bit easier for me to produce by myself at this stage.

For all of these releases my mind is brimming with ideas for the Album artwork & concept too – I’d love to do a sheet music booklet of the instrumental soundtrack EP… and I would really love to do a Zine with the upcoming EP featuring a bunch of photos, sketches, jumbled lyrics and friend’s art; paintings, murals, photography…

Other news!

I’m still working on the Metal track for a band down here that are after choral style vocals in the chorus sections.
All the jokes have been made about how good my hair would be for headbanging. I’m really looking forward to heading into the studios and getting some ambient/epic/choral metal down.

& in my free time (haha.. free time) I’m working on some vocal tracks for Luc Reid’s awesome dance tracks. They’re really fun! I’m always at a loss for lyrics when i first hear them, but it’s so lovely to get outside your comfort zone and channel some other energy into something different.
His style takes a lot of influence from “The Friendly Fires” & “Miami Horror” as well as “Kimbra” and a bunch of other sweet bands.

I have a bunch of new photos to put in this post too – but i have to transfer over to my laptop to get them all off my iphone.

Fun fact: Today is ANZAC day & my uni is shut for the day… yesterday I put a curry in my locker.
…. it’s still there.

My easter/uni break is pretty hectic, I think eating chocolate & drinking chai is the only way to get through it all – 15 assignments to finish for VCA, a few songs to record for the upcoming EP, I’m recording choral layered vocals for a friend’s metal band (Yeeho! Keen! – *cue Elle headbanging) & going to see a lovely acoustic band almost every night this week :-)

I keep trying to convince my dad that easter is the time for buying daughters real bunny rabbits.

Here’s a beautiful clip from Insight Creative backed by one of my tunes. How cute are Violet & Holly!

Here’s the blog to go with it!

Melbourne has been incredible – University, work, going to gigs, new best friends, adventures in new places & a house filled with music and art. It’s surpassed all of my dreamy hopes of how amazing it would be.

We now have a studio in the back yard in a brick shed which opens out onto a veggie garden & a back patio. My producer and friend Mitch Nordine has moved in & has been creating some wonders for Mindbuffer & Mindtree. It’s cool going into the kitchen & hearing a new track he’s working on as I make dinners. It’s also great having someone else up at 2:30am to drink cups of chai with & to talk to about recording/composing tasks for university.

My parents have been down over the weekend. Easter family fun.. – mum’s insulated the studio & dad’s secured the roof of the shed for winter. The garden’s exploding with new herbs and corn, capsicum, cucumbers and flowers… I’ve been able to show ma all the new cool cafes and galleries I’ve found since moving here. Every time my mum comes to melbourne it’s clear blue skies – so it’s been great adventure weather. It’s a shame as SOON as she leaves it’s probably going to hail and then go sunny and then rain and then sit somewhere inbetween.. sigh.
Ma also brought down the Nord Electro! Woo! more keyboards for gigging. So excited. It looks pretty dreamy in my room having the Nord Stage with the Nord Electro with the M-audio MIDI keyboard stacked ontop. I feel like I should join Kraftwerk or some cool synth band and dance like a robot (not really)

Some cool new things with my music – !

FEATURED IN||
It’ll be featured in two different photography films – including one for a hospital in the Gold Coast. The other is for an Easter clip for the wonderful team at Insight Creative.

FESTIVALS||I’m going to be playing at Palm Creek Folk Festival & A fundraiser at Mornington Peninsula later in the year! There’s going to be a CD out in JB-Hifi of all of the artists to promote the festival soon too. Excited for that.

FILM CLIP||
I’m so so so flipping very excited to be working with a photographer called Nirrimi in the Blue Mountains later on in the year. We both wanted to work with each other, and it’s finally coming together! Her photographs are so dreamy and ethereal. I’m super keen for the film clip we’re going to make together!

NEW EP|| Tuesday next week.. i’m recording the first bit of the new EP. I have the photos for the cover already done by the wonderful Miss Kohii.. they come out on her website this weekend. So excited to see. It was shot along the great ocean road in these white barked forests. I had a bindi on my head and a sweet red cape. I even got to climb a few trees in my white stockings. Really happy to be sharing them with you via facebook in the next few days!! :-)

University is incredible. Really overwhelming and challenging – but i love it for that reason too. It’s cool sitting around with friends practicing rhythms and sticking patterns, humming songs, learning ridiculous jazz chords & doing history assignments on film music. The guest lecturers are phenomenal & the history classes are super enjoyable; the lecturer dances around exclaiming words like “GRAVITTTY!” “The big BANG! where music all began!!”
It’s also really open to different artistic ideas, which is awesome. There’s no wrong way of doing it, but for the sake of grading – there are adjustments you can choose to make. That’s been a great discovery, because at the start of the composition degree it was overwhelming thinking i had to stick to a classical harmonic approach to everything.

In the last few months I’ve seen quite a lot of live music. In the last few days I’ve seen “Crosby, Stills & Nash” & “Saskwatch” Also on Wednesday I saw Yann Tiersan!! I got to meet him outside the theatre, too. So surreal! He’s one of my favorite composers, based in France.

Anyway! back to writing this song.
Elle

I met Rach up in Townsville in 2010, when I entered her Rising Star awards at the Townsville Fashion Bash. I was late with my entry & ended up emailing her a few songs from my EP in an email. She said my tunes gave her goosebumps & that I should enter, even though the comp was only a few days away!

The comp had a workshop intertwined with it, where Kim Cooper from Australian Idol & Rachael gave us talks on keeping healthy, being confident & performing well – as well as sharing a few of their experiences in the Entertainment industry.

That day I met Jesinta Campbell too; as we were paired in the first duo group activity. I think we were pretending we were on a roller coaster, and from memory Jesinta was super duper enthusiastic about us wearing the hats we found in the room we were practicing in. I think mine was an old bowlers hat and hers was a big sun hat – just what you need on an imaginary rollercoaster.

The competition was held at the Riverway Arts Centre and it had the most incredible sound team (Go Katie Boyd and her incredible Sound team!)

The Performance

From that point I was given flights to Sydney, a $1000 wardrobe from Lonsdale, Make up, Shoes, a photoshoot on the Sydney Harbour & an expense paid week in Sydney.
Insanity!

Here are some photos from the Trip:
Flying out of Townsville:

The View from the Hotel

From the shoot:
Getting ready!

Vibranti Photography:

Last night I went with my friend Lucy to see an incredible Singer-Songwriter from the UK called Mike – He goes by the band-name “Passenger”
Lucy met him on the street as he was busking and she quickly made him up a promo poster for his Hobart gig because he told her he was a little worried because it was the following night. Out of this she made a new friend quickly (As lucy is known to do..) as he busked & she worked away on photoshop. To say thanks Lucy got free tickets to a special little secret show for pre-ordered album #1 fans. Post attending the show now, I am now easily in that category of fan, I felt a little quilty standing next to die-hard fans that mouthed every single word, when I was there experiencing the magic for the first time. The album’s been preordered & the demo disc I received last night has been on repeat :-) I strongly reccommend pre-ordering from JB-Hifi, you get a signed beautiful copy of the release sent straight to you.

Really excited :-)!

A lot of other stuff has been happening apart from being blown away by live music here.

I’m now represented by Midnight Choir for international music synchronization – primarily in the USA.
This covers everything from TV, Film, Ads & Documentaries. !! yay! Find out more here:
To celebrate this I’ve started recording some new songs; all ready for an instrumental EP & a 5-track folk EP. My goal this year is to record as much as possible to increase my chances at landing a few syncs overseas :)

I’ve been taking strides, living independently. I can now cook & each week i ride my bike to the markets and fill my basket with veggies and free-range eggs, sour-dough bread and big bags of rice. I have a lovely little cottage in the city close to a large park & cute little cafes too. It’s going to be nice being on uni lunch breaks and being able to walk to these parks with my laptop & compose.

My family have been sending down letters and care packages which have been making my days. In turn I send them back little postcards explaining how when I bought a printer, I wore stilettos all the way to office works, and then stumbled all the way back with the printer, still wearing them. The agency recommended wearing heels everywhere… holy dang. Failing.

I’m missing my little white dogs. The other day I hugged a friends rabbit for quite a while. It’s taking every ounce of will power not to go out and buy one straight away (They’re so cheap and cute!) But i have a feeling life is only going to get busier & busier.. and perhaps adding a dependent cute little creature into the mix won’t end up being the best option for it, or me.

____________________________

Christmas was a time of terrible expectation, during which, for one week prior to the fateful day, our family was confined to the claustrophobia of our winterized home, forced to “spend time together”. For a family who mixed like vinegar and baking soda, this was a cosmic blooper. My siblings and I were out of school for two weeks, but, unlike summer vacation, (with the various distractions of summer camp and summer jobs), during Christmas break, we were snowed in on all sides, cooped up in small, poorly insulated rooms, and forced, by our father, into the manual labor of household chores: hauling wood, sweeping the stairs, picking fleas from our dog Sarah. This was his version of Family Time.

My father survived the holidays through work, taking on multiple jobs, double shifts, or implementing odd, complicated, time-consuming chores around the house, such as shoveling two-lane walkways in the snow in the yard, and an escape route to the creek out back, in case of an emergency. He joined civic clubs, became a volunteer fireman, attended multiple self-help groups, anything to keep his mind away from the notion that his family was, in fact, a messy, fussy, dysfunctional menagerie of misfits. As for his children, confined inside, breathing recycled air – we fought all day. My sisters, having more prep time in the bathroom in the mornings, hissed and yelled over hair gels and curing irons. “Did you eat my lipstick?” “Did you break my nail file?” My older brother and I would find ourselves writhing, biting, and wrestling under the Christmas tree, overturning bookcases, TV stands and sofa chairs. My father would jump in, separate us, give us a slap on the face and ask: “What are you fighting about?” We could never remember.

Each year, our mother carried the impossible burden of making Christmas “spectacular”, and this often threw her into a psychological state of mind one could describe, in medical terms, as temporary insanity. She spent money she didn’t have, lots of money, imaginary money, money based on speculation, future jobs, hopes and dreams, the kind of money promised by lottery tickets and Amway. Her motives, perhaps, were good: who could blame a mother’s desire to make Christmas perfect for an otherwise imperfect family. But the results, over time, were incriminating. Credit cards engorged and then ignored, bounced checks, money borrowed from distant relatives, great grandfathers, next-door neighbors, train sets and suit coats and wool vests from J. C. Penney put on lay-away, sometimes for years. She brought home elaborate Christmas wreaths, scented candle sets, music boxes, decorative Christmas plates with Elvis, Gene Kelly, and Winona Ryder, designer snow suits, a family toboggan, a Saint Bernard, a Jeep Cherokee. Each item brought home, whether big or small, ignited, between our parents, complicated, colossal disputes as epic as the battles of the Odyssey or the Iliad, Often resulting in egg salad smeared all over the bay window or pots and pans thrown about the kitchen with the pageantry of a Texas high school marching band. In the most heated of arguments, our mother would run to the tree, grab an inconsequential gift (breath mints, a paper kite, a gift certificate), and throw it in the wood stove – an impulsive, spiteful, and (most likely) cathartic gesture. She would stand over the flames like a high priest making a sacrifice, counting down backwards, from ten to one, breathing deeply between each number, ruminating on the incineration of an unopened present. It must have been metaphor for something deeper. But what?

And this is where I began to really hate Christmas. One year, when it snowed 72 inches in two days, and my sister started her period, and my mother brought home sixteen pounds of discount jumbo shrimp from Wal-Mart, and my father reminded her that he was allergic to shellfish and his face would swell up, and our dog chewed up the Encyclopedia Britannica, and our cousin called and said that Aunt Josie had died in her sleep and my mother started to cry and declared Christmas was cancelled. Then she stomped over to the tree, grabbed the first gift she could find and threw it in the wood stove with a quick flick of her wrist, like swatting a fly.

“There, it’s done,” she said. “I feel much better.” But the gift she chose happened to be a six-pack of ordinary tube socks, wrapped in plastic. Which I had bought as a peace offering for my brother. (The week before, I’d cut the toes to all of his socks – using my mother’s good sewing scissors – after he’d told all my friends at school that I still sucked my thumb and slept with a Care Bear.)

“I paid good money for those!” I told her.

“Oh dear,” my mother said, stepping back from the stove. But it was too late. They were cheap, acrylic, dollar-store tube socks, manufactured in China, spun out of pliable man-made materials, synthetic fibers, which, when burned, began to melt, ooze, liquefy, and bubble over, triggered, perhaps, by some extraordinary and complicated chemical reaction. The smell was harrowing – a dense, bold, toxic aroma, the Smell of Death (as we later called it) which, when metabolized in the gloomy atmosphere of our home, spread from room to room in a noxious smoky haze, lilting under doorways and air vents with the speed and agility of hot lava. We were being suffocated in our own house. My mother ran out the front door; I found the nearest window.

“What is that smell?” My sister screamed from her bedroom. “The Smell of Death!”

It forced everyone else in the house to immediately abandon his or her particular private tasks (for my sister, it was nail polish remover, for my brother, a home-made fire bomb he’d been building under his bed) and seek immediate egress outdoors. We met in the winter maze of the driveway, feet stamping, shoulders shuddering, tsk tsking each other, inhaling the icy air of a blizzard, watching our father leap around inside, leveraging windows, propping doors, fanning the smoke and fumes with a folded newspaper.

“Good going!” my sister rolled her eyes.

“Next time, buy cotton,” my mother suggested.

“Why is this my fault?” I wondered.

“Because you’re a cheap-o,” my brother said, jabbing my collarbone. I kicked snow in his face and he punched my ear and my sister screamed because she lost an earring and my mother started counting backwards from ten to one, mumbling prayers under her breath.

It took forty-five minutes for the air to clear, and even then, after we’d returned to the chilly reaches of our rooms, there was the faint smell of burnt tube socks lurking between the walls, behind doors, nestled in the window curtains and in the bath towels and in the hair on our heads. It stuck around for weeks, months, years; perhaps it never left us. Even today, whether I’m at home in Brooklyn or in some distant East Asian country, Christmas still leaves a plastic taste in my mouth, a toxic residue that reminds me of tube socks.

Is it any wonder then, that after years of enduring the Stevens Family Christmas Crisis, I grew to despise the Holidays with the kind of deep antipathy one usually reserves for things like racism and terrorism and corporate fraud? The sight of Santa Claus at shopping malls, the scent of candy canes, the insipid singing of carols – these things roused in me a silent, sardonic, patronizing judgment against all of Western Civilization. At some point, perhaps my second year in college, Philosophy 101, I decided that Christmas was a social construct, along with dating, fast food, and the Super Bowl. I made a point of not coming home for the Holidays. I would have Christmas on my own, entrenched in my reading: Rumi poems, Descartes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ayn Rand. My first Christmas alone was in a dorm room. My second Christmas alone was at a Holiday Inn. My third Christmas alone was spent in a dirty little apartment in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a turkey pot pie in the microwave, Jeopardy re-runs on TV, Simon and Garfunkel on the stereo. I am a Rock. I am an Island.

My sister called to say, “Why aren’t you coming home anymore?”

Because, I told her, our mother is a Christmas Pirate and our father puts duct tape on his slippers, and the Siamese cat throwing up pine needles all over Grandma’s gingerbread house is not my idea of a family tradition. Because if I have to carry another load of wood up those stairs I will file a child labor lawsuit. Because Christmas is for sentimental psychopaths and if we continue celebrating it we will all spend our golden years in a mental hospital eating canned peas with a spork.

My sister told me I was irrational and deluded, but very imaginative and perhaps I should write a novel. That was a good idea, I told her. So I tried. And failed. And tried and failed. “Revenge of the Christmas Pirate,” by Sufjan Stevens. “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever,” by Sufjan Stevens. I read some of it out loud to my sister, over the phone.
“I like the part about the dead squirrel wrapped in tissue paper that Dad gave as a stocking stuffer,” she said. “But you know that never actually happened.”
“Yes it did,” I insisted. “Everything’s one-hundred percent accurate.”
“You need therapy,” my sister said. “Or a girlfriend.”

But what I really needed was time – the slow, immeasurable convalescence that comes with getting older, wiser, more mature, and to withstand the intellectual conditioning of college and graduate, the automation of office jobs, numerous cubicles, desk-top publishing, the morning commute, failed romantic relationships, a nervous breakdown, a death in the family, a root canal, unemployment, a recurring cold sore, weekends slouched over the classifieds, wondering how I would pay off my credit card debt. Over time, in the midst of everyday life, I completely forgot all about Christmas and how I hated it.

And this is how I came to love Christmas. Through the regular household task of making pancakes. It was a time in my life in which all extraordinary privileges had been rigorously swept away, leaving behind nothing more than the naked underlay of loneliness. I was unemployed, unshaven, living in a closet in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, delinquent on my student loans, eating day-old potato bread, Ramen noodles, and on this particularly apathetic morning in dearly December, I was ruminating on the dietary constituents of Aunt Jemima pancakes – the cheapest of morning breakfasts (you just add water!). I had accidentally left a spatula on the stove with the burner on high, and, within seconds, the whole thing went up in flames with a dripping, oozing, pungent, chemical eruption like a bad high school science project. I hustled to the rescue, dousing the flames with a nearby glass of milk, suffocating what was left of the spatula with a dirty dishrag (oh the trials of bachelorhood). But the residual smell (a plastic, toxic, peppery aftertaste) was irrefutable and all too familiar – the smell of burnt tube socks. And, for some odd reason, this singular smell sent me into a tragic-comic-sentimental shock that was simultaneously mundane and supernatural. I was having an epiphany.

I did not jump up in with ecstatic salutations, shout “Eureka!” or levitate like a phantom ghost. But I was overcome with what I can only describe as That Creepy Christmas Feeling. This pertains to that prolonged, numbing, out-of-body experience you often encounter after weeks consuming egg nog, mild chocolate candies, fruit salad, cranberry sauce, entertaining family and friends, attending Christmas mass, trailblazing superstores for discount appliances, regurgitating small talk to second cousins, deconstructing the rhyme schemes on holiday greeting cards, cutting out coupons, watching animated Christmas cartoons on TV, having an allergic reaction to pine cones, breaking out in hives, and spending New Years Day in the emergency room with everyone too hung over to visit you. The muddy plastic malodor from a melted spatula (prompting that consequential memory of tube socks) induced all of this at once – like a drug overdose. They say that smells persuade memory more vividly than pictures or sound, that our olfactory system carries with it a catalog of sensory data that can, when stimulated, call to mind entire memories, histories, events, all kinds of valuable information once thought forgotten. What came over me was not just the inconsequential stench of footwear thrown in the fire, but a complete recollection of important events in my life, the good and the bad, the blessings and misfortunes, and inventory of calamities and a register of lucky breaks, fist fights, bear hugs, overturned Advent candles, digital wrist watches, chimney fires, ruby earrings, blue jeans, tennis shoes, mistletoe, my first kiss. And with all these things I came to comprehend the formation of genealogies, family histories, a genetic superstructure that could be used describe – in microcosmic terms – the order of the universe.

And at the very center of the universe I saw the Christ Child, an infant baby, helplessly crying, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in the manger, trembling and suckling and cooing and burping and crying and laughing and giggling and spitting up breast milk all over the place. This was the mysterious incarnation of God, who came to Planet Earth not as a Divine Warrior or a Supernatural Sorcerer or an Army of Alien Androids, but as a helpless newborn baby, probably not much bigger than a six pack of acrylic tube socks. Or maybe a twelve pack.

Get Real, Get Right from Asthmatic Kitty on Vimeo.

So excited about this film!
New stuff from Mumford & Sons…AND Effy from skins. Double win.

In my senior year we did a epic theatre performance based on the Bronte sisters. I think it ended up being my favorite drama assignment out of all of my schooling.
We could take bits of script & words from their lives at any point and weave them into our own little tale.
There was so much beauty in their work, in that they were so pure – yet wrote about so much passion and longing. I found it incredible that they could weave those tales using a pen and paper – yet live out on the lonely moores by themselves, physically & emotionally detatched from any man.

Job: Music supervisor
Companies that hire them: Most movie studios, TV production companies, video game makers, and advertising agencies employ music supervisors on a freelance basis.

How to find out about openings: Forget the want ads. The trajectory for this career starts with grunt work, like opening mail at a music label. Once that door’s open, prepare for years of essential industry networking. Only the well connected land one of these coveted gigs.

How much you can earn: Freelance contracts are usually negotiated on a per-series or per-episode basis. Depending on the project and their level of experience, supervisors can expect anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 per film. For TV the range is $1,500 to $4,000 an episode.

Useful skills: An obsession with music and an ear for undiscovered bands. Also a plus: enough charm and tenacity to negotiate with music labels as well as the patience to sort through a mountain of legal paperwork to secure broadcast rights.

Number of jobs in the U.S.: Probably less than 500.
Alexandra Patsavas knows that no TV moment, be it a dramatic breakup or a tense open-heart surgery, is quite as poignant without a melody behind it.
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As the owner and founder of Chop Shop Music Supervision, Patsavas lays the background tracks for a sizable chunk of prime-time programming. Her nine-year-old company sets the musical mood for such shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Shark, Without a Trace, Rescue Me, Supernatural, and Numb3rs. It’s a job any music buff would kill for, admits Patsavas, but she says there’s more to her job than going to concerts and listening to CD’s. “I don’t think people realize what kind of legal processes are involved,” she says. Patsavas spends about 25 percent of her day securing broadcast clearances from music labels and publishers.

Patsavas also has to work on a strict schedule and with tight budgets. She currently supervises six television series, each with up to eight musical slots to fill per episode. Typically, she only has one week to select the music for each show before it’s televised. And while she won’t disclose the budgets she’s given, they’re limited enough that she has to spend much of her time haggling with record companies and publishers. Fees “depend on how long the use is and how big the band is — is it Radiohead or your mom’s sister’s friend’s band? The range is about $1,500 to $20,000.”

Because she’s known for making Billboard kings out of indie sensations, bands are always clamoring for Patsavas’ attention. She receives hundreds of submissions a week, many through Chop Shop’s MySpace page. Even already-established groups vie for her golden ear. “Coldplay came to us,” she says, referring to the band’s single “Fix You” debuting on season three of teen soap The O.C., which Patsavas oversaw throughout its four seasons.

She’ll miss The O.C., which came to an end this year. Before going off the air in February, the show yielded six compilation albums of her choices. “I had incredibly generous producers who always wanted to make music a character,” she says of the series. “But I’ve got my movie Invisible coming up, new scripts are coming out, and I’m looking forward to [head O.C. writer] Josh [Schwartz]‘s new projects.” And if the hundreds of submissions she receives a week — through the mail and MySpace — are any indication, there’s lots of unsung talent left to crown.
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Typical day:

9:30 to 11:30 a.m. Meets with execs from ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy to discuss song selections for scenes that need music.

11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Reviews cues (a.k.a. clips of songs that are cut to a scene) for Supernatural, a CW network program Patsavas oversees.

12:15 to 12:30 p.m. Eats lunch in her Acura TL while teleconferencing with Atlantic Records, for which she’s currently developing a label.

12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Loads about 15 CD’s of new music submissions into her iTunes. She samples each disc but doesn’t feel the need to listen to every second of every track. “Bad music just screams,” she says. She keeps five.

1:30 to 4:00 p.m. Expedites legal clearances. Without securing all the rights, her song selections won’t make it to prime-time TV.

4:00 to 5:30 p.m. Watches a 40-minute cut of Without a Trace, CBS’s F.B.I. drama, in preparation to pitch the editors song choices for a few scenes.

5:30 to 7:00 p.m. Writes an entry for her blog on the music of Grey’s Anatomy.

7:00 p.m. Leaves the office and heads straight to a concert.

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