In late 2012, the Mark Evison Foundation came to my Sixth form college to offer students a 'School's Award', which included a grant of £500 to help complete a challenging project.I was one of the students that was offered this fantastic opportunity, and from late 2012 to July 2013, I began work on an album heavily inspired by Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon and KT Tunstall's Eye to the Telescope.
I planned to work with several friends who were musicians, artists and website creators, and compose a piece of music from teamwork. With this in mind, I began to work with another musician (Zaid Hassan) from the band I was in at that time, Stand Your Ground.
Unfortunately, we had embarked on the album at a time close to our final A-level exams, which meant less time to work. Also, although I had musical training though A Level Music, neither of us knew how to use Logic Pro music software to record, edit and manipulate audio to the point where we had a good, finished set of songs.
I had been given the contact of music producer Paul Castle, who over the summer and autumn months, recorded and mixed the first 3 songs from my album. The song titles are as follows:
- 'Is This What I Live In?'
- 'Welcome to the World'
- 'Night Life'
As the first of these songs feature news excerpts, I won't publish 'Is This What I Live In' as I do not want to infringe copyright law.
I am hugely grateful to the Mark Evison Foundation and the work that they continue to do. Their website can be found below:http://www.markevisonfoundation.org/And I am especially thankful to Paul Castle, who produced and engineered these tracks, and helped me in my understanding on how to write for strings (e.g. 'Night Life'). Paul's website can be found here:http://www.faradaystudios.co.uk/
The second and third tracks are now available on my Soundcloud page:
https://soundcloud.com/raymondsookrammusic/sets/thoughts-project