Part 2 of my Music is the Music Language photoblog.
You can find words on is this music?

It was good fun going to this but I couldn’t go to the whole thing.
So there are some large chunks missing unlike the my photoblog of the Retreat festival.
It only had a small chunk missing.

I found the band Opaque insanely good fun to photograph.
They had 2 red light bulbs on each side of the stage.
Red lights can cause problems for concert photography, you quite often get horrible blown out images when these are used.
The trouble with Opaque was that digging out the flash would destroy the whole ambience.
What kept it was shooting long exposures as if shooting fireworks and using other people’s flashes as a catch light.






Muscles of Joy had a lot of A capella singing between the various members using their voices as instruments.
It was quite impressive to listen to but how exactly do you show that in a photo?
By including the disembodied shadows of the other members maybe? Well that’s what I tried to do.
It was also quite dark which was causing me problems.
I couldn’t just bust out the flash or else I’d have to shoot the whole series with flash.

I must admit that it’s taken me two attempts to really get what Two Wings are all about. I’m sure there’s a bad pun in there somewhere.
They are probably a bit of an acquired taste but I really enjoyed watching them here and now I’m finding something strangely alluring about them.
The first few photos I took I had to use flash as the stage lights were off for some reason.
Flash was dialled in at -3 and I think I got somebody else’s flash as a catch light too.


From one band quite easy to photograph to one quite difficult.
I find Gummy Stumps really hard to photograph but I am a fan of what they do.
Guitarist/singer Rob doesn’t look the same in a still image as he does in action there in front of you.
If you’ve never seen them then you’d never know but if you were actually there, well then you’d think I’d messed up.



Another band that I am a fan of and also the band I most wanted to see is Withered Hand.
I didn’t expect t see a full band set, I’d have been happy watching a solo performance
I could write stuff about them but I think you just need to look at the faces of the crowd to understand what this was all about.

The One Ensemble were arranged in a circle in the middle of the room.
The crowd was gathered around them.
I wasn’t sure where to go or how to shoot this and I wasn’t going into the middle.
The lights cast big shapes on the opposite wall and I wanted to try and capture the feeling in the room.
The second last photo here is an in camera double exposure. I felt a single image wasn’t really capturing what I was seeing.

Moon unit had a pair of strobe lights on the floor in front of the drum kit.
This made it like watching a movie at the wrong frame rate or like looking at a flick book.
The Sunday night noise bands worked better for me.
Moon Unit were a million miles away from the On Ensemble that preceded them.
I don’t think I’ve quite caught it with these images but then I’d probably need an animated gif to really do that.



The lights were fairly even for Correcto but bands with 2 microphones bug me.
No matter where you go you always end up with a photo of someone with a microphone in their eye.
Actually unused microphone stands also bug me. It’s really hard to shoot something when you’ve got unwanted obstacles.


Tattie Toes were crazy. Completely nuts but absolutely brilliant.
One of my highlights in fact. They had everything from skiffle to free Jazz to Basque songs.
It was after about 2 songs that I realised the words weren’t in English. It all just seemed to make sense.
They had a couple of planks of wood on stage which two of them ended up drumming on with smaller wooden blocks.
I had no idea where they were going to go next and I could not take my eyes off them.

Ultimate Thrush were like the Ku Klux Noize Klan
I foudn them really hard to photograph as they were in the crowd being their own moshpit most of the time.
Had to use my flash on some so that means I have to use my flash on all of them.

I like the name Vom.
Saying it pleases me. Say it. “V-Ō-M”
They were difficult to photograph as well due to the wall of bodies they had collected and the weird strobe lights they had.
Which meant one thing for me. Flash.

Blue Sabbath Black Fiji have a name that my fingers find hard to type.
Can you guess what they want to type instead?