Circle of Light Week One
* DISCLAIMER - There is some swearing in the footage, but we believe it is in context and the young women who wrote it are using it to express their experiences through their art.
Circle of Light is a project being held over 3 weeks at Metronome in Nottingham. The project brings together local young people with a variety of interests ranging from singers, rappers, poets, producers and artists to and through a series of workshops with industry professionals. The aim is to release an album through local label ‘I’m Not From London’ exploring mental health issues. The project is currently underway and with the end of the first week drawing near, this is what has happened so far.
Once introductions were out of the way, the first day focussed on language, this broad topic led to a range of results – from songs about the Nottingham dialect, trip hop music about synaesthesia and spoken words about cat calling and heckling. These ideas lay the foundation for the rest of the week. Projects which started in practise rooms have started to be recorded in the amazing facilities found at Metronome (part of the Confetti campus).
Izaak signed up to the course following struggles with trauma and mental health as well as physical health issues that were making it difficult to produce music. After reaching a point where he was considering the possibility of giving up music all together, this course offered him 3 weeks to fully embrace the opportunities provided. He describes his experience of the first week as followed:
‘I came here and I applied to try and find an opportunity to express myself, try and find a path where I can feel strong again, try and inspire other people, get inspired by myself and be inspired by other people. I want to just continue to learn and grow and keep moving forward. So when I started and didn’t feel like I fit in at first as I was quite anxious. 3 weeks is not a lot of time to work on an album, I’ve been working on mine now for 2-3 years so I know how much of a process it is. Obviously there’s so many people and so much talent here that it’s easy to think it will come together. I started out by trying to meet people and communicate ideas. We started out talking about language and ended up talking about using colours to express words and feelings and how we can use those colours to manipulate the language we use to describe things. So instead of describing something as orange, it would be rustic blood. We then started to piece together the instruments we had in the room, just playing some simple beats and involving other instruments and we’ve actually ended up recording two rough cuts. The guy on the keyboard has won a Grammy, in what other world would we be put in a room with someone who has won a Grammy! Having an opportunity here, in a safe environment with all these other people who understand mental health, music industry and just life, it’s literally invaluable.
I’m a bit nervous about the next two weeks, I think there’s a lot of directions. The main thing for me is just being involved and present, being able to create something. But it’s all the aspects, being in the studio, using the desk, little bits of editing, splicing together bits of music to have unique collective feeling. When it’s get to that point, and we get more ideas, it’s interesting to see the direction we go in. I’m most looking forward to performing and seeing what comes out at the end of it all. When I write stuff there’s a lot of subtext so it will be interesting to see how other people perceive it and what they take from it. I’ve been collecting vinyl for a little while now as I like to have a physical version of music so to actually have a vinyl pressed of music we’ve created in a studio, that will be a brand new experience for me as I’ve only ever dealt with digital music and that’s so boring. I want to be able to hold the vinyl and see the indents where my words come in and have the physicality of it, because that’s art in itself’
Aimee also signed up to the project due to her passion for combining music with talking about mental health. She said that much of her previous solo work was aimed at raising awareness and talking about these issues so when she saw this project being advertised by I’m Not From London decided to sign up. ‘I saw it was centred around mental health and as someone who suffers with mental health and have tried to raise awareness for, I felt like it would be something I would fit into quite well and would enjoy. I’ve been working on a little bit of everything, I worked with two of my friends who also study here and we started working on a song about mental health. We’ve been doing some looping, kind of dark but like a rock vibe. I then stood in as a bassist for another group and that was more of a relaxed and happy song. Then today I’m working on a kind of Radiohead/Creep kind of vibe song. So just trying to do a bit of everything as this week is the writing process so next week we can build on them. I’ve enjoyed meeting new people and working with the practitioners and getting that feedback from them to improve. I worked with Rob yesterday and that was a lot of fun because his music is quite different but there’s still some crossover bits that we can relate to and go off those. I’m looking forward to the recording process as I really enjoy that, I like hearing how the ideas we started with actually end up. I’m a performer so I’m looking forward to putting them into the live setting. I think from when I was doing solo work and doing mental health stuff, I worked with the Roy Stone Foundation which are a charity that lets young people have a platform to play and also raises awareness for mental health. This fits in quite well with that because we are able to use the facilities here and getting to meet loads of musicians. I think this is something which will be really good for people as I’ve spoken to people here who have their own issues and we can all relate which can be put into the music. So this will also hopefully help those who listen to the music.’
