Looking Back - one image, two tracks!

We are currently writing up our report for our Fund B programme "Industrious" which started in 2019, and survived the travails of the COVID-19 pandemic, the various phases of lockdown, re-emerging again with face-to-face activity in the Summer of 2021 through to December 2022. Naturally, it's been a wonderful opportunity to review all the work we've done on the programme. As project manager, three items jumped out at me yesterday when I started looking through the archives.... one image and two audio tracks... which together summed up our experiences of the past four years.

ONE IMAGE

The photo here is of our first "Inclusive Ensemble" session after lockdown restrictions had been lifted. This took place in Autumn 2021, quite a few months on from the official lifting of restrictions that year in May, but something we had delayed re-starting due to the extreme vulnerability of the participants (all of whom have profound and multiple learning difficulties)... and as you can see, we were still all wearing masks and maintaining social distance! Unfortunately, this was one of the groups that suffered most under lockdown and, although we piloted some online sessions, they weren't entirely successful and so we took the decision to rest the group until the pandemic had passed, Since then, the group has made great strides and we are beginning to feel we've made up lost ground... but the photo is a blast from the past and a reminder of how much we have all gone through over the past few years!!

TWO TRACKS

The two tracks included here - "Rain and Thunder" and "Halloween Song 2022" - represent, to me at least, the core of what we have been trying to achieve with the programme. 

"Rain and Thunder" was recorded in situ during a project for looked-after-children in the Easter holidays 2022. These holiday projects tend to focus on songwriting and the process of recording the songs and adding tracks "in the box", but this piece arouse, somewhat spontaneously, from an ad-hoc session run by one of our music leaders, Rebecca Price, at a time when the attention of the young people was in danger of wandering.... they had finished their song and gone through the production process and were a bit demob happy. The track has a vibe and rough energy that perfectly captures the raw creativity of the young people in the room at the time. There's nothing more to say than that really... just listen to the track. (NB: The sound FXs were added in post-production).  

"Halloween Song 2022" came out of a session with our Wellingborough Music Club (part of our Music Production Teams initiative) that imaginatively uses voices and a guitar delay pedal (connected to a dynamic mic) to conjure up a wonderfully spooky sound world before moving onto a more conventional song structure. This use of the "studio environment" as a creative playground was one of the ambitions of the programme... and this piece is a wonderful example of what is possible. 

Hope you enjoy listening!